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INGALLS 

OF KANSAS 

A CHARACTER STUDY 



BY 

WILLIAM ELSEY CONNELLEY 

Author of " Ingalls Memorial Volume," "The Heckewelder Narrative, 

"John Brown," "Wyandot Folk-Lore," "Doniphan's 

Expedition," etc., etc. 



TOPEKA, KANSAS 

PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR 

MDCCCCIX 






Copyright, 1909, 
By William Elsey Connelley 



PRESS OF 

THE HALL LITHOGRAPHING COMPANY 

TOPEKA. KANSAS 

1035 



10- 1% J 



©CLA2535'a 



PREFACE 

A bolt of lightning is described as of small 
amperage (scarcely any dimensions), but of ter- 
rific voltage (force, power). 

Intellectually the late Senator John James 
Ingalls was a dynamo of limited amperage and 
unlimited voltage. 

He could not become a consuming fire, but he 
could sometimes annihilate the object of his 
wrath with a flash of his genius. 

WILLIAM ELSEY CONNELLEY. 

Topeka, Kansas, 
August 30, 1909. 



DIGEST 

In my former volume on the late Senator 
Ingalls I attempted little beyond the collection 
and preservation of material. In character- 
analysis such a work must of necessity be unsat- 
isfactory. My object is to supply that deficiency. 
Here I present brief studies of Senator Ingalls — 

In his Home life — 

In his attitude towards Religion — 

In his achievements in Literature, Oratory, 
Politics. 

They make up the sum of what he did in this 
life. Knowledge of him in these relations will 
reveal traits sufficient for the basis of an esti- 
mate of his powers and his character.* 

*The articles from which quotations are made are to be found en- 
tire in my first volume — published by the Franklin Hudson Publishing 
Company, Kansas City, Mo. 



SYNTAXIS 

I. Kansas and the Coming of Ingalls. 

II. Home Life — 

a. Mrs. Ingalls. 

III. Home Life — 

a. His Children. 

IV. Keligion. 
V. Literature. 

VI. Polities. 
VII. Miscellany. 



KANSAS AND THE COMING OF 
INGALLS 

Those who were so many years acquainted with 
the late Senator Ingalls supposed they knew him. 
They met him to discuss political situations, saw 
him before throngs and audiences, were charmed 
with his perfect rhetoric and matchless sentences, 
met him on trains and at hotels, wrote him let- 
ters and received replies, but not a single one of 
them knew him. They walked to and fro with 
him, and, wandering up and down in the earth, 
turned night into busy day that he might not be 
cast from his brilliant course. And they wept 
with him when he fell never to rise again. Even 
then they did not know him. 

It was the good fortune of many to sit in car 
or lobby under the spell of his inimitable mono- 
drama until, pointing to the east, he said, 

"Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day 
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops". 

Yet they knew him not. 

Senator Ingalls came early to Kansas. Topeka 
was then a frontier village of cottonwood cabins 

3 



KANSAS AND INGALLS 

lost in prairie grass and hazel brush. There was 
not a mile of railroad between Missouri and the 
Pacific Ocean, and long after his rise to emi- 
nence the buffalo stalled trains on the old Kansas 
Pacific. The domain of the wild denizens of the 
Plains extended from the Wakarusa into those 
endless wastes beyond the head waters of the 
Republican and the Smoky Hill. The commerce 
of the prairies still rolled over the Old Santa Fe 
Trail in those ships of the desert fashioned after 
the design of the famous Conestoga. He saw the 
wilds subdued, — the solitude, filled with homes 
and cities, the seat of an intelligent constituency 
that met him with enthusiastic acclaim in the 
zenith of his course, with not a citizen of them 
all who knew him. 

Some knew him better than others, of course, 
and some of his friends of longest standing be- 
lieved they knew him through and through. All 
was not given, however, to the most devoted. 
There were chambers of soul to which none were 
admitted. But this was not by design. It might 
be said that he was unconscious of it — that he 
sometimes wondered why he was misunderstood. 

The cause was mainly temperamental — con- 

4 



KANSAS AND INGALLS 

ventional only by incident. To some he gave 
more than to others. To all he gave as much as 
in him lay. To one some depth of soul became 
visible. To another some flash of genius revealed 
a different attribute. 

Calvinism found a congenial soil in New Eng- 
land. Its harsh and intolerant aspects were in- 
tensified by the stern and bleak features of that 
rock-bound land. The nature of every man is 
deep-rooted in the soil of his nativity. The back- 
ground of the life of Senator Ingalls was the 
granite hills of New England perceived through 
Puritanism of the severest sort. The mild cli- 
mate, the generous soil, the broad expanse, the 
immense rivers, and the gorgeous autumns of the 
Great Plains softened the austerity and set aflame 
the imagination of this scion of the Puritans. 

Kansas attracted Ingalls. The very word en- 
grossed the Nation's attention. It became the 
talisman of the champions of human liberty and 
that noble band of Americans who determined to 
build a state where slavery should never set foot. 
It poised as a nemesis above those who sought 
to rivet perpetual shackles on a portion of man- 
kind. What manner of land can it be? 



KANSAS AND INGALLS 

A noble expanse of endless undulations rising 
and falling like the mighty swells of the rolling 
ocean. Here, the far-off rim of the world where 
the purple mist, like an amethyst crown, presses 
gently down upon the brow of the lovely land- 
scape. There, where the sun falls like a golden 
globe, 

"From out the rich autumnal west 
There creeps a misty, pearly rest, 

As through an atmosphere of dreams, 

A rich September sunset streams; 
Thy purple sheen, 
Through prairies green 
From out the burning west is seen". 

Valleys adown which wind the silvery streams, 
marked by the dark-green foliage of trees, lying 
like broad ribbons flung carelessly athwart a 
tinted carpet aflame with wild flowers. Herds of 
lowing cattle on a thousand hills. Troops of 
horses for the armies of all the nations of the 
earth. Fields of alfalfa dew-gemmed and glit- 
tering in the morning sun. Golden harvests so 
ample that a world may have bread. Walls of 
corn — unending walls of corn. Cities where 
commerce moves with busy feet, and iron ways 
along which pour the products of a prosperous 

6 



KANSAS AND INGALLS 

and happy people. The gentle rise of rolling hills 
where come the generations of children to school. 
And overhead and above all, away up and up, 
the broad reaches of iridescent skies. There 
come, too, the lazy days when 

"The cottonwoods that fringe 

The streamlets take the tinge; 
Through opal haze the sumach bush is burning; 

The lazy zephyrs lisp, 

Through cornfields dry and crisp, 
Their fond regrets for days no more returning". 

That is Kansas. 

Roving bands of Indians. Wigwam villages 
where women screamed to the chorus of wolfish 
dogs. Herds of buffalo that surged up to the 
Rocky Mountains like the waves of the restless 
sea. Prairie-dog towns marking the lonely emi- 
nence. Clouds of sand-hill cranes drifting gro- 
tesquely overhead. The prairie chicken rising 
nervously with whirring wings from the brown 
grass. The sluggish fish in the soil-stained 
streams. The earth and all that live thereon 
where the winds were fierce and the heavens 
brass. Brown tangled grasses of never-tilled 
lands. Shallow streams wandering aimlessly until 
they frayed out and disappeared in thirsty sands. 

7 



KANSAS AND INGALLS 

Gnarled shrubs twisted awry by never-ceasing 
winds. Ranks of swaying eottonwoods with 
bending willows at their feet. Sunrise and sun- 
set, but no seed-time and never a harvest. Burn- 
ing siroccos, consuming drouth, biting blizzard 
decade after decade, age after age, and no change. 

That was Kansas. 

There beyond the Mississippi it lay, its western 
confines indefinitely set by the imperceptible rise 
which reaches up to the snowy ranges of rock- 
ribbed mountains. The vast basins of great trib- 
utaries of the Missouri lay to the north; and the 
branches of the lower Mississippi stretched away 
to the south. Inaccessible from the west and be- 
yond reach of the east, it was set aside for the 
use of the Indian by those who awaited a time 
opportune for the effort to plant there the in- 
stitution of slavery. And thus it spread its fer- 
tile and primitive limits outside the pale of civil- 
ization while history was recording pages of 
events. 

It had no large rivers, no high mountains, no 
lakes, no dense forests, no fertile meadows, ap- 
parently no natural wealth. Kansas was a wild 
desert where General Pike believed future gen- 

8 



KANSAS AND INGALLS 

erations might perhaps raise goats. But it was 

a desert with the possibilities of redemption. 

Then 

"Came the restless Coronado 
To the open Kansas plain, 
With his Knights from sunny Spain". 

And like the other Spaniards of his day, he could 

"Die for glory or for gold — 
But not make a desert quicken". 

The Spaniard could plant a flag but not an em- 
pire in North America. And so he passed. 

Then came the volatile and ever restless 
Frenchman. To find the West he traversed Can- 
ada. Far and wide journeyed the stern old Jesu- 
its. They explored the dark and gloomy forest 
and followed tiny streams until they became "the 
mother of floods, the father of waters". "Wander- 
ing through the melancholy woods in which were 
the villages of the Hurons, they crossed the 
mighty rivers to the land of the Dakotahs and 
the Osages. But they never took root in Kansas. 
And, so, they passed. 

The Mississippi remained the western bound- 
ary of our country until 

"The blue-eyed Saxon race 
Came and bade the desert waken". 



KANSAS AND INGALLS 

But before this hour of destiny struck the nine- 
teenth century was in swaddling clothes. From 
a compact habitat along the Atlantic these Saxons 
had battled with the Frenchman on the north, the 
Spaniard on the south, and with savages up to 
and beyond the Alleghenies. They had rebelled 
against the mother-country and won for them- 
selves and their children liberty and self-control. 
One of the historic business-ventures of this en- 
terprising people was the purchase of Louisiana. 
Along with many other things came Kansas. 
After preliminary processes it was defined — had 
bounds set for it. Then the two ideas of our 
national progress came with followers to contend 
for supremacy, which, once attained in Kansas, 
was to carry with it mastery of the Nation. With 
those who came to build the temple of liberty 
came Ingalls. 

Those who break the wilderness are always 
the stalwart and the brave — the courageous — 
men with faith, foresight, fortitude. The men 
and women who came to settle and redeem Kan- 
sas were themselves descendants of pioneers — 
"Strong builders of empire". 

On the 4th day of October, 1858, John J. Ingalls 

10 



KANSAS AND INGALLS 

arrived at Sumner on the steamboat "Duncan S. 
Carter". He came, it seems, in search of this 
city, which had been "depicted in a chromatic 
triumph of lithographed mendacity", and at the 
instance of "the loquacious embellishments of a 
lively adventurer who has been laying out town- 
sites and staking off corner lots for some years 
past in tophet". 

Sumner was the Free-State rival of pro-slavery 
Atchison. Albert D. Richardson, later the author 
of Beyond the Mississippi, was a resident of 
the town when Ingalls arrived. The town was 
a few miles below the pro-slavery metropolis, and 
it extended to and beyond a bluff so steep and 
high that the main street was said to be "ver- 
tical". 

This town was founded by John P. Wheeler, a 
surveyor described as "a red-headed, blue-eyed, 
consumptive, slim, freckled enthusiast from Mass- 
achusetts". He also founded the town of Hia- 
watha. He named his river town not for Charles 
Sumner, as one would be likely to believe, but 
for George Sumner (brother), who was one of 
the proprietors of the place. "Wheeler was an 
abolitionist, and his town was conceived in the 

11 



KANSAS AND INGALLS 

same spirit that gave the Territory old Quindaro. 
"When the Civil War began the pro-slavery 
people generally left Kansas or changed political 
faith. Atchison had the better location, and the 
people of Sumner gradually went there to live. 
In June, 1860, a tornado blew down most of the 
houses left in Sumner, and from this catastrophe 
its extinction is dated. Jonathan G. Lang (the 
original of "Shang" in "Catfish Aristocracy") 
continued to live there on a tract of land which 
belonged to Ingalls, and was, in jest, called "the 
mayor of Sumner". Ingalls followed the other 
inhabitants of the defunct city of "Great Expec- 
tations" to Atchison. 



12 



HOME LIFE 

MRS. INGALLS 



HOME LIFE 

MRS. INGALLS 
I. 

Of domestic felicity an undue portion fell to 
Ingalls. In combat with men and the struggle 
to maintain himself in the world he was bold, 
diffident, imperious. In his home he was not so, 
although there his bearing was that of dignity. 

His ideal of home was a place of "sweet de- 
lights" whence man "goes forth, invigorated for 
the struggle of life". Man can not make a home. 
He can contribute something towards it. "With 
due deference to modern movements to bring 
women into public life — into political life — it 
must be said that a wise providence fixed bounds 
and limitations beyond which she can not prop- 
erly go. And this was the judgment of Ingalls. 
The platform, the forum, the fierce competition 
of market and mart, the rough grapple at the 
polls — these are for men. 

Only woman can make a home. That is her 
domain. There she is supreme. There is the 

15 



HOME LIFE 

place of "sweet delights" where man renews his 
strength, conceives his ideals, resolves upon pat- 
riotism, gains aggressive vigor for the battles of 
life. All social and political progress must ema- 
nate from the good home. Such can woman (not 
every woman) create and maintain. 

Ingalls assumed the bonds of matrimony with 
deliberation. He was nearly thirty-two. The 
effervescent enthusiasm of youth and immature 
manhood had burned itself away. The day 
wherein he might have flung himself at the feet 
of a giggling damsel in imploring posture had 
happily passed, and his proposal of marriage was 
by formal, self-respecting, but sincere and candid 
written instrument. The recipient of this remark- 
able hymeneal overture was Miss Anna Louisa 
Chesebrough, like himself, a resident of Atchison, 
and of New England ancestry. She was immedi- 
ately descended from a line of New York 
merchants and importers. The wedding was 27 
September, 1865. 

II. 

To understand the home-life of Ingalls some- 
thing must be known of the temperamental ten- 

16 



HOME LIFE 

dencies of himself and wife. She was stirring, 
aggressive, persistent, ambitious. She was san- 
guine, mentally strong, slow to abandon a pur- 
pose, tactful, diplomatic. He was conscious of 
his ability, but was the most indolent of men. 
He was well-nigh devoid of ambition, the little 
he had aspiring to nothing beyond a sufficient 
maintenance, — the object of all his early political 
activity in Kansas. He was impractical, but not 
visionary, and all his early efforts, successful or 
not, were followed by periods of inactivity, tor- 
por, apathy. "While the lessee of a newspaper 
in Atchison one of his diversions was the study 
of the specimen-books issued by type-foundries. 
These he would pore over by the hour, seemingly 
wholly engrossed with their jingling paragraphs. 
It was the ambition of Mrs. Ingalls that her 
husband should become noted as an orator. To 
this one purpose she bent every circumstance. 
By the Republican convention at Lawrence soon 
after his marriage, Ingalls was offered a nomina- 
tion for Representative in Congress. He refused 
the place at the instance of his wife. She did not 
believe the House held adequate opportunity for 
the development of his latent powers. When to 

17 



HOME LIFE 

others there appeared little possibility that he 
could ever attain the place in a state having the 
fierce and warring factions existing in Kansas, 
Mrs. Ingalls set her heart on the Senatorship for 
her husband and refused to consider anything 
else. That he attained that exalted place was 
due to her judgment and discretion, by which he 
was ever guided and controlled. He reposed per- 
fect faith in her ability and rarely acted outside 
of her direction. She did not so much care for 
the reputation he might make as a statesman, 
which accounts for the absence of great effort in 
that direction. Her ideal was that he become 
the foremost orator of the Nation. 

III. 

So much has been said in order to show the 
complete acquiescence of Ingalls to the ascend- 
ency voluntarily accorded his wife. For, as his 
career was political, subserviency there carried 
to all inferior matters. It had nothing of the 
nature of the compelling mastery of a superior 
mind, but was founded in unlimited confidence, 
complete devotion to his wife. She contributed 
nothing to his intellect. The funeral of Senator 

18 



HOME LIFE 

Sumner moved him to a sense of his loneliness in 
her absence, and he wrote : 

How full of mournful tragedies, of incomplete- 
ness, of fragmentary ambitions and successes this 
existence is ! And yet how sweet and dear it is 
made by love. That alone never fails to satisfy 
and fill the soul. Wealth satiates, and ambition 
ceases to allure : we weary of eating and drink- 
ing, of going up and down the earth, of looking 
at its mountains and seas, at the sky that arches 
it, of the moon and stars that shine upon it, but 
never of the soul that we love and that loves us, 
of the face that watches for us and grows brighter 
when we come. . . . You seem so precious 
and delightful to me, that I can hardly restrain 
my impatience to be with you and feel at rest. 

In sending her some violets from the mass of 
flowers sent to the Senate Chamber for the serv- 
ices in honor of Senator Sumner held there, he 
wrote : 

I woke at half past two this morning after bad 
dreams, feverish and restless, and longing for you 
and for Baby Constance, who has grown so ten- 
derly in my heart. Much of our united lives 
came back to me, incidents forgotten, songs you 
sung to Ruth in winter midnights in the little 
back room up-stairs so long ago ; looks, caresses ; 
painful, sad regrets for the injuries inflicted upon 

19 



HOME LIFE 

your love by my indifference and coldness and 
unkindness ; wonder that your love had not ebbed 
away from me and left me stranded in misery 
forever; hopes that we might not either be left 
long upon this desolate earth to mourn the other's 
loss. Oh, my darling! my heart cries out for 
you and will not be comforted. You must never 
forsake me, here or hereafter. If you go before 
me to the undiscovered country, guard me, and 
wait for me. If I precede you, search for me till 
you find me, with entreaties and importunities 
that will permit no denial, but will rescue me, 
though ages intervene, from the profoundest 
abyss. 

Ingalls wrote his wife full descriptions of his 
journeys, detailing the most minute and unim- 
portant incidents. It gave him pleasure to be 
intrusted with shopping commissions, his dis- 
criminating taste enabling him to execute them 
to her satisfaction. An example of these traits 
is shown in the following letter: 

Gov. Harvey met me at the depot, wanting to 
see me on some matters of business, and osten- 
sibly bound to visit some friends in "Trenton, 
Mo.", but on my suggestion that he had better 
go to "Washington, he said he would deliberate 
till we reached Kansas City, where he informed 
me he had concluded to go. I have no doubt he 

20 



HOME LIFE 

intended to go all the time, and that he started 
out with that purpose, but thought he would 
conceal it from me and make it appear like an 
extemporaneous hasty movement made on my 
suggestion. I did not attempt to undeceive him. 
Nothing keeps a man so well satisfied with him- 
self as the belief that all his little games suc- 
ceed without being detected by anyone. He went 
down on the "North Missouri", while we con- 
tinued on the Missouri Pacific, reaching St. Louis 
without adventure Thursday morning. Tough 
was with me, and after breakfast at the "Plant- 
ers" we crossed the river in the early sunrise 
and were soon rolling over the prairies of Illinois 
at the rate of twenty-five miles per hour. The 
day was cold and cloudy with occasional showers. 
The season is fully as backward through the 
whole country as in Kansas. Many fields were 
unploughed, and in others the grain was yellow, 
sparse and starved, as though it had passed a 
troublesome winter. The trees had hardly bud- 
ded, and the forest looked as gloomy and black 
as in January. Thursday night at nine we were 
in Cincinnati. The train did not move till 11 :10, 
and we walked up to the new "Grand Hotel", 
and looked through its marble corridors. A sud- 
den shower drove me to the depot, and as soon 
as the sleeper was on the track, I went to bed 
and slept well till we reached Parkersburg the 

21 



HOME LIFE 

next morning. The breakfast there was abundant, 
but cold, nothing being eatable but the stewed 
oysters, of which I ate two dishes. The morning 
was cold and raw, and the porter gave me some 
pillows and a red blanket under which I slept till 
we reached Grafton, where we changed into a 
"parlor car" with revolving arm-chairs and plate- 
glass windows which afforded us a fine view of 
the romantic scenery through which we ascended 
and descended till night dropped her curtain 
upon the landscape at Harper's Ferry. 

Mrs. Fairchild of Leavenworth was on the train, 
to meet her husband at Philadelphia, and through 
her I made acquaintance with quite a party of 
ladies and gentlemen whose peculiarities were 
more or less entertaining. Notable among them 
was a lady from Derby, Connecticut, whose af- 
fectations, airs and gestures, were as good as a 
play. She evidently desired to produce upon me 
the impression that she was learned in all arts 
and familiar with the great of all lands. Every 
lady of her acquaintance was superb, and every 
gentleman was elegant and courteous beyond de- 
scription. She took a seat back of me while I 
was reading and made several attempts to open 
conversation by casual remarks about the scenery, 
to which I responded in monosyllables, but at 
hist, having finished the "Popular Science Month- 
ly" and got enough of Tennyson, I submitted to 

22 



HOME LIFE 

the inevitable by a series of questions that en- 
abled her to tell me what she was burning to 
disclose in regard to her wealth, associations, 
grand acquaintances, &c, to each revelation of 
which I accorded an undisguised tribute of re- 
spect. As we neared our journey's end I told 
her how much gratified I was by the fortunate 
accident of our acquaintance, how much I had 
profited by her ideas and what an honor I es- 
teemed it to know her, whereupon she brought 
her husband round and introduced him, and he 
gave me a cordial invitation to visit Derby where 
his horses and carriages were at my disposal and 
his house should be my inn. I don't think I shall 
visit Derby this month. 

"We rode to Willard's in a street car, and I told 
the clerk if he could give me a well-lighted, sun- 
ny, commodious apartment for a few days I would 
stay with him, but otherwise I would go else- 
where. He looked at the register, rattled round 
the key-rack, consulted three or four volumes 
and pulled his mustache as though it was a fear- 
ful problem to solve, and finally gave me a pri- 
vate parlor, and bed-room with bath, on the east 
front, second floor. There are probably fifty 
guests at the house, with accommodations for five 
hundred, so you see how necessary it was to be 
deliberate and profound in his cogitations. I ad- 
mire hotel clerks. If I had time, I would write 

23 



HOME LIFE 

an essay on the subject, but the Indian problem, 
the Louisiana questions, and the coming Presiden- 
tial campaign require attention first. 

Yesterday (Saturday) was pleasant and ver- 
nal. The city does not yet wear its summer 
garb. Spring is backward. The leaves are about 
half out. The grounds have not yet been cleaned 
much, and the general aspect is wintry. I was 
at the Departments all day; fixed up some post- 
office matters : got several land-sales postponed : 
had several appointments made 0. K. There is a 
great row about the Indian contract for supplies 
this year, and some Kansas men think they have 
been badly treated, and I must help them if pos- 
sible. The Commissioner is going to New York 
to see whether it can be arranged and I shall wait 
till his return. I hope to leave Monday or Wed- 
nesday but may be detained later. I have not 
yet seen the Att'y Gen'l in relation to Tough's 
case, but shall do so to-morrow. Harvey is here 
at the Ebbitt House. I met Gen. Boughton at the 
"Holly Free Lunch" yesterday where I was regal- 
ing myself with a bowl of oatmeal and milk, and 
he invited me to dine with them at four this P. M., 
which I agreed to do. Shad are plentiful, and so 
is asparagus, but in other respects the markets 
and tables are like winter. Breakfast begins 
with oranges au naturel. Last night I went to 
the theater and was sorry I forgot to borrow your 

24 



HOME LIFE 

opera glass, as the "peerless M'lle. Morlacchi" 
danced very much like the oranges above named, 
in the spectacular drama of the "French Spy". 

I will not forget your hat and the dresses nor 
the pap spoon. You are the dearest of wives, 
the best of mothers, as well as one of the noblest 
of your sex, and I only regret that I cannot do 
more for you, and be more to you than I am. 
You have the entire admiration, confidence and 
esteem, and the undivided love of your 

Unworthy but affectionate Husband. 

IV. 

Ingalls saw everything. Little that he saw es- 
caped record in his letters to his wife and chil- 
dren. The old Episcopal church-building at 
Alexandria has had many visitors. Few of them 
ever wrote a better description of it than Ingalls 
sent his wife: 

Mr. Blackford and I have to-day been to Alex- 
andria to the old church formerly attended by 
Gen. Washington. We took the F Street cars to 
the ferry at the foot of Ninth, and started at ten. 
A brisk wind was blowing from the north, but 
the day was otherwise pleasant. The little voy- 
age of six miles was accomplished in about half 
an hour, and we were moored at the crazy old 

25 



HOME LIFE 

dock of what was once an important commercial 
metropolis. It is now a queer old decayed, dilap- 
idated town with narrow, steep and ungraded 
streets that are a mixture of irregular cobble- 
stones and the nastiest kind of black mud. All 
the sewage of the city is discharged over the 
sidewalks into the gutters, and the pedestrian is 
continually stepping over picturesque little rivu- 
lets of dishwater, soapsuds, and viler fluids, mixed 
with potato parings, coffee grounds and cabbage 
leaves that trickle over the uneven brick of the 
pavement and twinkle fragrantly in pools and 
puddles in the sun of the Grand old Common- 
wealth whose proud boast is that it is the mother 
of states and statesmen. Gen. Stringfellow once 
told me he had some relatives there, but I had 
forgotten their names, or I would have called 
upon them. 

The church is almost half a mile from the 
river and fronts west. It is built of rough red 
brick that were brought from England, and ought 
to be immediately taken back to the kiln they 
came from. It is about sixty feet long by forty 
wide, with a hipped roof, and a double tier of 
small-paned, heavy-sashed windows that are 
enough to give permanent obliquity of vision to 
any man who looks through them. The bell- 
tower is low, inartistic and quaint, with a round 
top. On one side is a wooden projection covering 

26 



HOME LIFE 

the entrance to the church and the galleries. It 
stands in a small plat of ground, perhaps half an 
acre, planted with scraggly old trees that cast 
their weird shadows upon the ancient graves 
that have sunk to a level with the rich grass that 
covers them. It seemed strange to think that 
those forgotten sepulchres had once been newly 
opened, with the fresh earth heaped by their 
side, and that weeping, heart-broken mourners 
had seen their friends lowered into their silent 
depths, and that now the loving and the loved, 
the mourners and the lost, were wrapped in a 
common oblivion. 

On the north side of the church is a glorious 
growth of ivy almost like a tree, densely matted 
to the brick-work, and covering the roof and wall 
with its sturdy, defiant and luxurious verdure. I 
send you a leaf that I plucked close by the 
window that looks in upon Washington's pew. 

Upon entering, a very pleasant lady asked if 
we were looking for seats, and showed us to a 
side pew to the right of the rector, where we had 
a fine view of the congregation. It is a plain 
room, with galleries on three sides, with a row 
of wooden pillars beneath, which, with the rest 
of the wood-work, are grained. The pews are 
high and have solid doors with buttons. The 
Avails are whitewashed, and the cushions are 
mostly red, faded and shabby. The chancel is 

27 

-3 



HOME LIFE 

raised two feet and projects into the room like 
a platform. It has a wooden fence around it. 
and the furniture, desks and chairs are modern 
walnut. The choir consisted mostly of boys who 
were gathered round the organ that stands in the 
gallery fronting the preacher. The singing was 
glorious. The audience was a cheap-looking col- 
lection of low-browed, poorly dressed commoners 
with some notable exceptions. Many of the girls 
were of the Virginia Herndon type, with scollops 
and "spit curls" plastered along their brows 
and temples, in regular waves that are supposed 
to be so bewitching. The rector is young, dark, 
smooth-shaven, high-toned, with a dirty surplice. 
He read and preached from Isaiah — "The ox 
knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib, 
— but Israel doth not know, my people doth 
not consider." 

Nearly opposite me was a lady who looked 
so strikingly like you that my heart almost 
stopped as I looked at her, and thought that 
perhaps you had unexpectedly come on and fol- 
lowed me in my wanderings. She was about your 
height and stature and complexion, though she 
wore a dotted veil which makes all women look 
more or less alike. She had the same low broad 
forehead, the same dark intense look from the 
eyes, and that indescribable something that we 
call "resemblance", and more striking than all 

28 



HOME LIFE 

she carried her head one side higher than the 
other, as you always do when sitting still. I 
forgot to look for her when the services closed, 
so that I do not know whether it was a fancy 
evoked by distance, or not. 

The seat that Washington used to occupy was 
pointed out to me, and the ghost of the old 
warrior seemed to fill the room with its great 
presence, as I pictured him moving down the 
aisle in the costume of a century ago, with fat 
old Martha, his wife, and a dozen relatives and 
dependents, besides those who waited with the 
chariot outside. 

I do not know when I have enjoyed a day 
so much. The service really seemed good and 
pleasant, and I would like to join a church if it 
were always so satisfactory as to-day. Blackford 
is very quiet and unobtrusive, but at the same 
time affords that feeling of society which is 
always a relief in a strange crowd. I do not like 
to be wholly alone, and yet I do not like to be 
disturbed. I never like to travel now without 
an attendant of some kind, knowing the dangers 
which beset public men. While waiting for the 
boat which runs every hour, we ate an oyster- 
stew, and reached the Washington dock at three. 

I wonder what makes me love you so much. 
Why is it that out of all the millions of women 
in the world I turn irresistibly to you? How 

29 



HOME LIFE 

have you established such a tyranny over me? 
Why am I such a slave? Others smile upon me, 
but I heed them not. My sighs constantly ascend 
for you. When I look at the window whence I 
used to see you watching for my coming, my 
heart swells with grief and your name bursts 
from my lips as if I were a child. There is a 
feeling of dependence upon you, as if you could 
protect and defend me from all the evil in the 
world, and as if you could save me from the 
dangers of the great hereafter. Your love is so 
strong, so pure, so faithful, that it gives me a 
sense of infinite tranquillity and infinite peace and 
rest. 

I think much of the children, but they seem 
to be only incidents of our love, not a part of me. 
They separate us for awhile — they educate and 
develop parts of our nature that would sleep 
otherwise — and then like sweet Ruth they take 
wings and fly away, or they grow up and have 
children of their own, and forget us, and we 
know them no more save as memories. So you 
and I have become less and less to our parents, 
and as our children leave us, we shall become 
more and more I hope to each other, till our 
union shall be complete and eternal. I can 
imagine no destiny so delightful as unobstructed 
companionship with your noble nature, with the 
love of your tender and passionate soul. 

30 



HOME LIFE 

So it was always. He ever turned to his wife. 
His home was the 

"Golden milestone: 
Was the central point from which he measured every dis- 
tance 
Through the gateways of the world around him". 

V. 

Mrs. Ingalls heard, by letter when not in 
Washington, of the doings and habits of his 
colleagues in the Senate, as witness : 

The Colorado millionaire, Tabor, took his seat 
last week. A fouler beast was never depicted. 
He is of the Harvey type, but indescribably lower 
and coarser. Such a vulgar ruffianly boor you 
never beheld: uncouth, awkward, shambling, 
dirty hands and big feet turned inward: a huge 
solitaire diamond on a sooty, bony blacksmith 
finger : piratical features, unkempt, frowsy and 
unclean : blotched with disease — he looks the 
brute he is. He was stared at with curious but 
undisguised abhorrence. 

D C is going to the bad at a hand- 
gallop. He has been drunk for the last ten days, 
and is now threatened with delirium tremens. 
His poor wife is in despair. It seems as if the 
devil had broken loose lately. V — has taken to 
drink again after a year's abstinence and has 

31 



HOME LIFE 

been kept in durance by his friends. Beck, Voor- 
hees, Morgan and half a dozen more are either in- 
flamed or besotted with whiskey half the time. I 
am not sure that prohibition is not salutary. It 
is singular that I am not led into this temptation 
myself. My grandfather Ingalls fell a victim to 
the appetite in his later days, and I have often 
wondered how I escaped. Sometimes I feel an 
unappeasable craving for champagne or ale, but a 
glass satisfies me. 

Whether despondent or in ecstacy, he turned 
always and ever to his wife: 

This is an enchanting morning. The air is daz- 
zling, and filled with the floating down of some 
tree or flower, which is thicker than snowflakes. 
It moves through the silver flood of sunshine with 
an indescribably lazy, graceful, undulating, hith- 
er-and-thither motion, which fills the soul with 
languor and stirs an impulse to wander without 
end or aim. 

I just telegraphed you that I could not leave 
till the last of the week. I enclose you two tele- 
grams rec'd yesterday to show you how I am 
beset. I hoped to be able to leave to-night, but 
it will not be feasible. — Last night, as I wrote 
you, Gov. H. and I went to see "Ronsby". She is 
too tall for my idea of beauty, and too slender, 
and her nose is too narrow, and she shows her 

32 



HOME LIFE 

white teeth too artificially, but she is unquestion- 
ably very lovely, and with that statement the 
whole has been told. She is not an actress, but 
has good clothes. One green velvet dress with 
gold bands down the front was very effective. 

I rose this morning at seven-thirty, lay ten min- 
utes in a warm bath, ate half a shad for break- 
fast, and shall proceed in a few moments to the 
Departments. 

My best wishes and my tenderest love go to- 
ward you through the splendor of this summer 
morning which shines upon the world like your 
affection upon the life of your 

Faithful Husband. 



VI. 



Called once to "Washington and detained be- 
yond the time he intended to remain, though but 
a few days, he became petulant and impatient, 
ending a letter to Mrs. Ingalls as follows: 

I hope soon to hear from you here. It is but 
little more than a week since I left home, but it 
seems a month. I miss you more and more. It is 
such a consolation to know that you are near me, 
in the room, in the house, by my side in sleep, and 
always loving me, always ready to help in time of 
need. I kiss you good night. 

33 



HOME LIFE 

Such fetters as he was bound with are never 
broken. They become the mainspring of life's 
actions, the foundation of devotion and reverence. 

VII. 

Ingalls owned a tract of land below Atchison. 
Much of it overlooks the Valley of the Missouri. 
Growing on it were groves of fine forest trees. It 
was his wish to erect there a residence in which 
to live. He despised "the foolish wrangle of the 
market and forum". It was his inclination to 
live apart from the world, an esthetic dreamer. 
The gratification of this whimsical desire the good 
sense of Mrs. Ingalls prevented. Had it not been 
for the practical and stirring qualities of his wife, 
Ingalls would have died an obscure country law- 
yer or editor, a real-estate agent, a petty and 
unsuccessful tradesman, or an employe in some 
department of government — and more than likely 
without a dollar. 



34 



HOME LIFE 



HIS CHILDREN 



HOME LIFE 

HIS CHILDREN 
I. 

To Ingalls and his wife were born eleven chil- 
dren. They were a source of unending pleasure. 
He was very proud of them. Once he caught 
sight of one newly escaped from the nursery, all 
washed, combed, and primped: he seized it and 
carried it before his guest, Albert D. Richardson, 
and exhibited it with fond pride. The children 
were an inspiration, and he wrote his Kansas 
Magazine articles with them about his knees, 
with, sometimes, one sitting on his table. He re- 
ferred to this feature of that work in his note 
to Mrs. Ingalls written on a proof-sheet of "Blue 
Grass" which by accident came into his hands in 
Arizona : 

Dearest Wife: "Blue Grass" seems to be one 
of those compositions that the world will not 
willingly let die. 

Those were happy days when it was written, 
in the little cottage on the bluff looking out over 
the great river, with a room full of babies : ob- 

37 



HOME LIFE 

scure and unknown, waiting for the destiny, so 
soon to come — (that was to make me one of the 
conspicuous figures of the country for so many 
years). How far away it seems ! 

Ingalls had great solicitude for the health of 
these little ones, and believing prunes conducive 
thereto, insisted on having a supply constantly 
at his disposal : meritorious actions were rewarded 
with prunes. He obtained much satisfaction and 
great amusement in constituting himself a judge 
to hear and determine the grievances the chil- 
dren might find against one another in their daily 
intercourse. 

II. 

Ingalls had much comfort from his correspond- 
ence with his children, especially his daughters. 
He was paradoxical and eccentric. Men never 
could understand him. But women could readily 
comprehend his whims and his fancies. Perhaps 
this is another instance of a strong masculine 
character with feminine traits and tendencies of 
thought. 

In a letter to Constance, away at school, he de- 
scribed an entertainment for young people then 

38 



HOME LIFE 

in progress at home. "There is much wise, im- 
proving conversation accompanied by convulsive 
giggling and shallow shrieks of laughter", he 
says ; and he ends with a rhyming warning against 
sweetmeats : 

Beware of the sweet-press, 

For demons untold, 
In its secret recess, 

Their revelries hold! 
Dyspepsia, sick-headache, 

And black molars are there, 
Whose pangs goad their victims 

To unending despair! 

Beware of the sweet-press, — 

Cake, jelly, and jam, 
Ice cream and fried oysters, 

Pie, candy and ham 
Rob the eye of its brightness, 

The cheek of its bloom, 
Make the liver inactive 

And the stomach a tomb! 

In the appreciative and delicately attuned mind 
all the phenomena of nature find instant response. 
The adequate expression of the emotion thus gen- 
erated is literature if written, music if sung, art 
if painted. To Constance, after a period of very 
cold weather, he wrote : 

The cold wave seems to have passed off, though 

39 



HOME LIFE 

I don't like to say much about it, for we had a 
pleasant day some time ago, and talked consid- 
erably and chuckled over it, and that night the 
temperature sank below zero and stayed there 
for two weeks. It was a struggle for existence. 
"We closed all the doors, shut off the hall, cut off 
the water, had fires in the grates, stuffed cotton 
in all the crevices, and lived like Esquimaux in 
their igloos. 

But it really is lovely this morning. I went out 
for a stroll, after breakfast, on the stone walk, in 
the sun. Two fat brown birds hopped about in the 
branches of one of the shrubs, and Jim Crow [one 
of the family cats] kept me company, sometimes 
walking alongside, and then going before and 
rolling over a time or two to attract attention. 
When I pulled his tail and ears he growled fero- 
ciously and hissed like a snake, and then rolled 
over again. 

As I stood by the gate looking down towards 
Mrs. Crowley's cabin — she and Tim are both ill 
with the grip, influenza, colds, rheumatism, an- 
tiquity, &c. — the pealing bells of St. Benedict 
broke out into a swelling tumult of exalting mel- 
ody, vibrating and rising and falling, rolling north 
and south and east and west, down the valley 
and up to the shining zenith, and after an en- 
trancing interval, died away and were still. It 
was quite incredible that some shock-headed Pad- 

40 



HOME LIFE 

dy, who probably carries a hod or drives a dray 
during the week, could, by pulling a rope a few 
moments, produce such an ecstacy of sound on 
Sunday, without any idea that I would write you 
a letter concerning it. . . . 

The mind has much influence, and a cheerful 
spirit is better than medicine. Resolve to be 
well: don't brood upon dark thoughts: throw 
open the windows of your soul to the sun: take 
short views of life : get plenty of air, plain food 
and sleep, with moderate exercise. Write to me 
if there is anything you want. I should be your 
friend, even if you were not my child. 

The expression of the emotions aroused by any 
odd occurrence, droll incident, or ridiculous cir- 
cumstance is humor. It is one of the most agree- 
able, valuable and effective forms of literature. 
Ingalls was keenly sensitive to this literary qual- 
ity, and his best writing is but an exemplification 
of it. There is much of it in his letters to his 
children. Early one March he wrote to Con- 
stance : 

The wind is east, and has been in the same 
quarter most of the time for several weeks, with 
fogs, vapors, mists and dismal lamentations by 
night, as if we were by the sea instead of five 
hundred leagues inland. It has not been very 

41 



HOME LIFE 

cold, and under the drenching humidity the grass 
has grown green, and the lawn looks like April. 
I have never seen such verdure so early, but the 
constant cloudiness is depressing. 

This morning at breakfast we had a cat fight. 
Dandy was the aggressor. He pretended to be at 
play with Mr. Crow, who was not in a humor 
for mirth, and seemed rather to resent famili- 
arity. But Dandy kept at it, and finally they 
laid their ears flat on their heads, and spat on 
their hands and cuffed each other soundly, rolling 
and tumbling over each other on the floor, till at 
last Jim ignominiously retreated to the sitting- 
room in a very bad humor indeed for the first 
Sunday in Lent. 

The Friday Afternoon Club met here on their 
day last week : a very pretty, well-dressed, and 
well-behaved lot of girls, who would be an orna- 
ment and a credit to any society. Their topic of 
discussion was Louis XIV or XV of France. 
What they said about him I don't know, but I 
have no doubt they made his royal ears burn, or 
would have, had they not been in a much hotter 
place. 

A fine morning in spring and a view, from the 
bluffs about Atchison, of the Valley of the Mis- 
souri always threw Ingalls into rapture. In this 
condition he drank in the beauties of the land- 

42 



HOME LIFE 

scape, and in writing never failed to enumerate 
them. And if the grotesque appeared anywhere 
in the picture it was certain to be portrayed. 
See this April letter to Constance : 

This is a day when it is a pleasure to be alive. 
The sky is intensely blue, and cloudless save for 
a few white woolly cumuli that lie piled idly 
along the northern horizon, above the green hills 
that divide the waters of White Clay and Inde- 
pendence creeks. A scarcely perceptible breath 
blows from the west. The grass glitters in the 
sun. Dimly visible beyond the great curves of 
the shining river, veiled in amethyst, are the 
bluffs of St. Joseph and the trailing plumes of 
smoke from its towers. The hyacinths, red, white 
and blue, dazzle the eye like flame on the eastern 
lawn, and crimson tulips in another bed, emulate 
their fragile glory. The cherry trees in the orch- 
ard are turning white with blossoms, and the 
apple trees are fairly green with their infant 
foliage. James Crow lies lazily on the veranda, 
and Limpy, the spotted cow, grazes near the cot- 
tage, pausing occasionally to contemplate the 
awkward antics of her new calf that prances on 
the sward with tail high in the air, and an aspect 
of surprise at the exhibition of its unwonted 
powers. Bed-clothes, mattresses and blankets pro- 
trude from the wide-open doors and windows of 

43 



HOME LIFE 

the cottage, and a smell also that is equally 
noticeable. The dull alternate thud of the carpet- 
pounders resounds from the sitting-room carpet, 
suspended from a line near-by, and clouds of dust 
float towards Eeresby where the oaks and hick- 
ories seem almost conscious of approaching sum- 
mer. 

Yes : it is a nice day. It reminds me of the 
guide-board in Bill Nye's recent letter — "Go to 
Foley's grove and have a good time while you 
are alive, for you'll be a long time dead!" 

And here is one written the following Thanks- 
giving : 

It is a most entrancing morning. I have just 
come in from a stroll in the sunshine to and fro 
along the stone walk to the north gate. The sky 
is cloudless and the wind just strong enough to 
turn the mill slowly in the soft air. The smoke 
from the chimneys rises straight to the zenith 
and dissolves in the stainless blue. In the deep 
distant valley the river glimmers through a dim 
silver mist woven with shifting purple like the 
hues which gleam on the breast of a dove. Un- 
dulating along the horizon the bluffs rise like 
translucent crags of violet and indigo (blue, 
green, yellow, orange, red!) and from the city 
beneath, as from a gulf profound, columns of 
vapor and fumes from engines and factories, 

44 



HOME LIFE 

ascend accompanied by a confused and inarticu- 
late murmur, like whispers of protest and pain. 
During the night it rained, and the grass of the 
lawn is green. It glitters and scintillates with 
the transitory gems of the frost. Here and there 
are disappearing ridges of snow from the storm 
of Monday, and in the hollows of the grove the 
bronze leaves of the oaks are piled high, to be 
dispersed by the next gale, like the ruined gold 
of a spendthrift, or the vanishing hopes of men. 

We had a lovely breakfast at eight, — an 
"American hare", with chops, fried potatoes, 
cakes, fruit, and — pie! — pumpkin pie, upon 
which I fed with my eyes only. James Crow sat 
in my chair, gravely gazing at the viands, and oc- 
casionally looking up at me with a mute mew, 
opening his mouth piteously without noise or 
sound. Three white hairs have appeared in his 
whiskers, one of which stands perpendicularly in 
the atmosphere above his right eye, giving him a 
rakish and mephistophelian aspect. If he ex- 
hibited a disposition to encroach on the table I 
rapped one of his ears, which he regarded appar- 
ently as an act of great contumely, and would 
have resented had he not been restrained by tim- 
idity, or hope. 

Adieu, my dear child, and may the Lord have 
you in His holy keeping ! Be good, docile, obedi- 
ent, studious. Kemember that we all love you 

45 



HOME LIFE 

and think of you hourly, with tender affection. 
I enclose you a little Christmas gift, prematurely, 
but you can retain it till the time comes, if you 
choose, or not, as you will. 

A December letter shows appreciation of the 
wintry season. 

The morning is still and gray with an over- 
cast sky, presaging rain or snow. The few past 
days have been like a reminiscence or prophecy 
of spring, as if Nature were in a penitential mood, 
making reparation for past transgressions, or 
were furtively preparing for new depredations. 

Yesterday after luncheon I rode to Hamerwood. 
It was like April save for the lingering patches of 
snow in places sheltered from the sun, and the 
mire of the roads. But Rolla picked his way by 
the side of muddy ruts, and we got along very 
well. In the woods it was lovely, so still, and 
fragrant with the damp and decaying leaves. 
The waters in the pool under the cliff by the cas- 
cade were bright and clear as glass, reflecting the 
network of twigs and branches like an etching, 
and a little solitary silent bird was the only ten- 
ant of the forest. I found the cows in a sheltered 
glade looking as sleek and comfortable and con- 
tented as need be, and apparently glad to see me, 
Ole especially. I took a chunk of rock-salt in my 
pocket for them, which she took in her mouth 

46 



HOME LIFE 

and vainly tried to chew. Her efforts were pain- 
ful to behold, though she seemed to enjoy it, 
judging from the way her mouth watered, as the 
children say. The others gathered about her, wait- 
ing for their turn to attempt to masticate the 
delicacy, which she was rolling as a sweet morsel 
under her lips like a girl in a chewing-gum ec- 
stacy. The sun was descending as I approached 
the city, gilding with transient luster the towers 
of Midland and the spires of St. Scholastico, and 
the windowed front of the Orphan's Home, dimly 
discernible through the mists against the northern 
sky. 

The interval between Thanksgiving and Christ- 
mas to me is the pleasantest of the year. The 
days grow shorter and shorter and the earth more 
homelike and habitable; shut in from the mys- 
teries of the sky, one can be lazy and useless with- 
out reproach. I know of nothing more indolently 
delightful than a brief day of drifting snow, with 
its late morning and early nightfall, and an in- 
teresting novel by the seclusion of a smouldering 
fire of logs on the library hearth. And there is 
nothing more dreary and desolate than the next 
morning, when the sun from a cloudless east 
shines cold and clear above a white and glittering 
waste. 

The Honorable James Crow is in good health, 
though disgracefully corpulent. His obesity af- 

47 



HOME LIFE 

fects his voice, which is wheezy like an accordeon 
with a hole in it. 

Ingalls could not escape the consequences of 
vagrant, worthless, shiftless neighbors, as wit- 
ness this : 

The only thing commendable about the season 
so far is that it is splendid for the grass which 
thrives luxuriantly in the cool humidity. It is 
so much richer inside our gates that all the vag- 
rant horses and cows on the common sneak in 
when we are not looking, and then rush tumult- 
uously out when they are shouted at, knowing 
very well that they are trespassers. There is one 
old, blind and crippled quadruped with a long 
rope attached to a block of wood who seems par- 
ticularly fiendish in his invasions. I was nearly 
choked with rage just after breakfast by find- 
ing him in again on my finest sward. I thought I 
should have an apoplexy, and shouted to Ben to 
capture him, and then call the City Marshal to 
take the beast to the pound. Just then a bare- 
footed, bareheaded girl in a flapping pink calico 
garment came running over the hill, and upon 
inquiry informed me the animal was "ours", and 
drove him away. I think some of having the 
place fortified with a line of earth-works all 
round, with bastions at the corners, and a draw- 
bridge and portcullis. Then with four pieces of 

48 



HOME LIFE 

artillery, and a regiment of infantry armed with 
magazine rifles, we can protect ourselves against 
the incursions of our neighbors. 

Last week when the weather was fair I spent 
a day burning the leaves and brush in the groves 
and hollows in every direction about Oakridge. 
The wind had brought in all the newspapers and 
rags and debris of this part of the country and 
lodged them against the trees and fences and 
shrubs and in the ravines. The smoke of my con- 
flagration filled the whole valley of the Missouri, 
and must have been visible as far as St. Joseph 
and Leavenworth. It looked very black after- 
wards, but the new grass is growing, and it is 
like a great park in every direction. The nodding 
flowers of the dog-tooth violet deck the warm 
slopes with their transitory beauty, and the dan- 
delions are preparing to star the verdure with 
their vanishing gold. 

This raking and burning on the first day pos- 
sible in the spring was a habit with Ingalls. The 
day was regarded with something akin to terror 
by the household, particularly the cook. She al- 
ways declared he would set the house on fire and 
never failed to provide pails of water for that 
emergency. But he was so much in earnest and 
raked so vigorously and issued orders and gave 

49 



HOME LIFE 

commands so grandly and took the whole matter 
so seriously, that there was enjoyment in watch- 
ing him. 

He never failed to describe in his letters the 
country through which he passed nor the objects 
of interest coming under his observation. He 
wrote Constance of his visit to Springfield, Mo., 
noting the principal features of that fine town : 

I returned last night from Springfield, Mo., 
where I spoke Monday night. Your Uncle Fran- 
cis, you remember, is President of a college there. 
The town lies rather incoherently scattered along 
the ridge of a stony hill, one of the spurs of the 
Ozark Mountains, sloping towards abrupt and 
picturesque valleys, shaded with forests of stunt- 
ed oaks, and bright with the purple of violets 
and the gold of dandelions and other nameless 
blooms. Tuesday afternoon we drove to the 
Mysterious Spring from which the city is sup- 
plied with water. Descending a rugged decliv- 
ity, we emerged upon a little verdant plain, con- 
fronted on the north by a ledge of gray rock ris- 
ing perhaps fifty or sixty feet and wrinkled by 
frost and rain and snow and heat like the bony 
forehead of an aged hermit. It was overhung 
by the branches and vines of a forest just touched 
with the verdure of April, and in the crevices of 

50 



HOME LIFE 

the cliff nodded precarious flowers in the soft sun- 
light. At the foot of this crag opens an arch 
with regular curve perhaps twelve feet wide and 
six feet high, the mouth of a cavern receding 
into the rock, from which, like the fountain at 
Horeb, emerges a strong bright clear stream of 
water so copious and constant that it is more 
like a subterranean river than a spring, and fur- 
nishes twenty thousand people with an abundant 
supply for their kettles and coffee pots. By en- 
closing a space in front of the arch with a wall of 
masonry a reservoir has been constructed in 
which the waters are collected for distribution 
by great pumping engines in a house near-by. It 
makes a lovely pool like that of Siloam, trans- 
lucently clear and pure like the hue of young 
lettuce leaves, and the surplus falls in a musical 
cascade over a dam and goes dancing and laugh- 
ing down the valley. 

As to how Ingalls was affected by external 
agencies he gives some insight in these letters 
to Constance : 

Vocal music is an accomplishment that never 
appealed to me very strongly, except choirs of 
men's voices singing simple chords and familiar 
melodies. I have heard many of the best women 
artists with no other emotion than that with 
which one sees a performance on the trapeze. 

51 



HOME LIFE 

But instrumental music moves me very power- 
fully, agitates me with uncontrollable and inde- 
scribable intoxication. The distant strains of a 
martial band vanishing with the march : a quat- 
rain of negroes blowing "harmonicums" at night, 
minor chords and nocturnes on a piano with low 
notes and plenty of pedal for vibration lingering 
on the sense : a bell faintly ringing beyond a for- 
est — such things sometimes move me even now, 
old and tough and world-worn and weary as I am, 
to tears. They summon spirits from the vasty 
deep : the ghosts of hopes that are dead : of dreams 
that have faded: of friends that are gone: of am- 
bitions that are quenched: of life's joy and bloom 
and splendor that will return no more. 

To me the loss of sight would be the greatest 
affliction because my love of nature and physical 
beauty is so strong. Hearing is limited. A short 
distance, the loudest sounds are inaudible. So 
with taste. ' It gives delight, but the body can be 
nourished without the sensibility of the palate 
and the tongue. If dumb we can still write and 
read and hear. If we are unable to perceive the 
fragrance of flowers we can yet be charmed with 
the color and outline. If deaf we can communi- 
cate with the eye and the pen. But to be blind 
is to be imprisoned in perpetual darkness : shut 
out from the universe, from the aspects of the 
earth, the sky, and the sea : unable to go or come : 

52 



HOME LIFE 

compelled to be led and fed and dressed like an 
infant, and denied the joy of beholding the faces 
that we love. But after all we adapt ourselves to 
these privations without much grief. I have seen 
many blind persons, but they are generally cheer- 
ful enough and seem to enjoy life very well. The 
soul is independent of the senses. These are the 
avenues through which it communicates with 
others temporarily, and are not necessary to its 
existence. I have no doubt there are many senses 
we do not possess : many properties of matter 
with which we are unacquainted: many more 
dimensions than length, breadth and thickness: 
more colors than those which glow in the rain- 
bow and the rose : many conditions immediately 
about and around and within, that we do not 
perceive, any more than my horse understands 
history and arithmetic, or the fish swimming in 
the ocean comprehends the great steamships with 
their cargoes of men and women and merchan- 
dise ploughing the waves which are his firmament. 
It is an incomparable morning. The grass glis- 
tens with thick white frost, and the dense columns 
of smoke and vapor from the town below, ascend 
slowly toward the dazzling sky. The vibrations 
of the convent bell, ringing for nine, linger for 
an instant, cease and are still. 



53 



HOME LIFE 

III. 

Ingalls was able to put himself on a level with 
the child in his correspondence — to feel and 
write like a child. He always had something to 
say that would certainly interest the young mind. 
To Marion he wrote of a trolley party : 

Sheffield reports this morning that you had a 
splendid trolley party last night, with many elec- 
tric lights, fine music and refreshments. Similar 
splendor prevailed here. The grounds at Oak- 
ridge were illuminated by an unclouded moon 
specially ordered for the occasion, several hun- 
dred thousand stars, and a million lightning-bugs. 
During the intervals till midnight four thousand 
bands composed of eleven hundred locusts, two 
thousand katydids and 7,569 black crickets played 
ragtime in the grass. 

And see this : 

The 
little 
Chester 
White 

Pig 

died 

this 

morning 

about 

54 



HOME LIFE 

eight 

o' 

clock. 

The 

calf 

is 

well 

and 

happy 

and 

so 

is 

Papa. 

Here is the fate of the gum-chewer cleverly 
stated in what he terms — 

THE SAD HISTOKY OF A LITTLE GIRL IN ALABAMA WHO 

CHEWED GUM. 



She got aboard at Pleasant Gap 

To go to bus Colum* 
And when the train-boy came she bought 

Some Pepsin chewing gum. 

II 

She chewed and chawed and chawed and chewed 

And chewed and chawed and chewed 
And chawed and chawed and chawed and chewed 

And chewed and chawed and chewed. 

*This should have been "Columbus" instead of "bus Colum", but it 
wouldn't rhyme. 

55 



HOME LIFE 
III 

And when she climbed the golden stair 

To go to Kingdom come, 
She never laid her cud aside 

But kept on chewing gum. 

IIII 

Saint Peter met her at the gate 

A looking very glum: 
She said "Oh, is my hat on straight?" 

And kept on chewing gum. 

inn 

"Why do you work your jaws?" says he, 

"From which no accents come?" 
"Oh that's because I chews", says she — 

"And wouldn't you like some?" 

IIIIII 

Whereat Saint Peter got very hot 

And whacked her with his key, 
And round she went, and down she went, 

"You mean old thing", says she. 

mini 

Past sun and moon and stars she fell, 

With terror stricken dumb: 
But through the wreck and crash of worlds 

She kept on chewing gum ! 

Nothing could be more droll and entertaining 
than the following letter to his daughter Marion, 

56 



HOME LIFE 

written in a serious vein, but in all kindness, and 
evidently in amusement : 

I received your letter yesterday, but it was so 
hot, and I was so busy, that I could not go out 
to get the gloves. I determined to rise early this 
morning, and when I looked at my watch it was 
a quarter before six. This was too soon to rise, so 
I put my watch back under the pillow and took 
another nap. "When I looked again it was nearly 
seven, and feeling that no time was to be lost, 
I bathed, shaved and dressed as rapidly as pos- 
sible. Then I rung for breakfast. I had two 
great plums, one purple and one yellow, three 
slices of dry toast, an egg, breakfast bacon and 
coffee. By this time it was nearly eight o'clock, 
and I left the house. I was for some time in 
doubt whether to take a herdic or a street-car, 
but finally concluded in favor of the car, and 
turning slowly down New Jersey Avenue I waited 
at the corner near the B. & 0. depot until an 
open car came along. I took a front seat by the 
side of a young man in a seersucker coat. When 
the conductor appeared I handed him a dollar 
bill. He gave me three quarters in silver and a 
package of six tickets, from which he took one, 
entitling me to a seat till the end of my journey. 
We passed slowly westward along D Street, into 
Indiana Avenue, past the City Hall and Police 
Headquarters, into Fifth Street. Here the car 

57 



HOME LIFE 

stopped to let off some passengers for the Pension 
Office, and starting up again ran smoothly along 
F Street, and paused at the corner of Ninth, 
Some confusion occurred here, so many desiring 
to leave and enter the ear at the same time, 
but at last we moved on, and arriving at the cor- 
ner of Eleventh, I rose and went to the rear plat- 
form. Fortunately a lady was waiting at that 
place to take the car, so I was not compelled to 
have the car stopped on my account. 

Entering the store, I inquired where kid gloves 
for children could be found. A polite attendant 
directed me through an arched opening to a dis- 
tant counter, where I found a homely young lady 
with pimples and a pink cambric or gingham 
dress. I made known my errand. 

"What size?" said she. 

"Five and five and a half," said I. 

"One pair?" said she. 

"One of each size," said I. 

Turning to the case behind her, she took out 
two packages carefully folded in white paper. 

"Who are they for?" said she. 

"For Marion Ingalls, of Oakridge, near Atch- 
ison, Kansas, and her little sister Muriel," said I. 

"Has she any money to pay for these gloves? 
They are a dollar and a quarter a pair, and we 
sell only for cash," said she. 

"She has between four and five dollars," said I. 

58 



HOME LIFE 

"Where is it?" said she. 

"In her bank at Atchison," said I. 

"Why didn't she send it?" said she. 

"She forgot it," said I, feeling so badly that I 
thought I should weep. 

She began to put the gloves back into the boxes 
again, saying that Mr. Lathrop told her not to 
sell kid gloves to little girls unless they sent the 
money along to pay for them, but agreed at last 
to let me have them if I would advance the 
amount till she could hear from you. This I did, 
and you will find the gloves in this soap-box, the 
fives for you and the five and a half for Muriel. 

Another in the same vein was later written to 
Marion and Muriel, from which the following is 
taken: 

I worked very hard all the forenoon, sitting in 
the hammock while Warner pushed the lawn- 
mower and George weeded the walks and flower- 
beds. They furnished the muscle and I supplied 
the brain power. It was a great strain, but I kept 
resolutely at my task, resisting all temptations to 
idleness, and when it was over I felt amply re- 
paid for all my efforts by the consciousness of 
duty performed and the smiles of an approving 
conscience. Tag sat in the shade snapping at the 
flies, and the birds sang now and then in the 
branches. I was shocked by the selfish and in- 

59 

-5 



HOME LIFE 

considerate conduct of the bantam cockerel who 
clucked whenever he found a fat bug, and as soon 
as his family came up, ate it himself. 

My labors were increased by a man who came 
to make some repairs on the roof, and when Pul- 
len's ice-wagon drove up, I began to think I 
never should get through. Just as I began to 
see the end of my toil, the carpenter appeared to 
put a screen-door to Sheffield's room to keep the 
mice from biting him in the night, and put a lock 
on the sideboard. By the time the bell rang for 
luncheon I was so exhausted that I could hardly 
walk to the ice-water bucket, but the sight of 
food revived me somewhat, and I was barely able 
to eat two slices of cold lamb, three baked po- 
tatoes, two slices of bread and butter with cur- 
rant jelly, a spoonful of smearcase, a dish of 
strawberries, a piece of cold apple pie, a slice of 
cake, a peach and an apricot, with a glass of 
water and a cup of tea, after which I felt re- 
freshed. 

The sensitive mind is started in a strain of 
thought by mere suggestion. The mention of 
golf by his daughter Muriel brought her the 
following : 

I had my hair cut this morning after breakfast 
at the tonsorial parlors of Felix : price, thirty-five 
cents. It is a great drain on my resources. My 

60 



HOME LIFE 

hair requires cutting once every three weeks at 
least, sometimes oftener, or it becomes ragged 
and bummy. Call it five dollars a year, for fifty 
years, and there you have two hundred and fifty 
dollars, and the hair gone also. Supposing the 
hair to grow a foot a year, my tresses by this 
time would have been fifty feet long, so that 
when I got to the bottom of the stairs the ends 
would just be dragging out of my chamber door. 
One year in college, however, I let my hair grow 
and hang down on my shoulders in curls like a 
sissy boy, so you might leave off one foot. 

So, golf has struck Atchison at last ! It has 
been a long time coming, but I have no doubt it 
is good healthy recreation. It is odd that the 
entire human race spends most of its time knock- 
ing little balls about. The baby has a rubber 
ball. The boy plays marbles, and as he gets 
older, plays base ball and football. Then he 
knocks balls with a stick about the billiard tables. 
Then he takes larger sticks and hits little balls 
in polo and golf. "When children get angry they 
throw spit-balls, and if men are mad they shoot 
pistol-balls. As soon as a girl grows up, she im- 
mediately wants to go to balls — (Loud cries of 
' ' Oh ! oh ! — Sneak ! — Come off ! — What ye giv- 
in' us!" etc.) So I desist, except to say that the 
Creator has filled the Universe of space with balls 
of different sizes which He spins and whirls about 

61 



HOME LIFE 

in all directions, and that we have a good ex- 
ample. 

I omitted to bring in fish-balls, and the bawls 
of the brat that stubs his toe and falls down, but 
these and many others will naturally occur to you 
without being specifically mentioned. 

Ingalls did not, however, always write humor- 
ously to his children. Concerning her approach- 
ing marriage he wrote his daughter Ethel a beau- 
tiful and affectionate letter: 

We are not, as a family, very effusive, nor much 
given to demonstration. "We do not "wear our 
hearts upon our sleeve for daws to peck at", 
though I have no doubt we feel as deeply as 
those who profess more profusely. 

I have thought much during the solitude of 
my voyage, while looking at the incessant fluctu- 
ations and vague horizon of the sea, of an ap- 
proaching separation, with the regrets that al- 
ways accompany such epochs, for the delinquen- 
cies and errors that are irreparable, and which 
we deplore when it is too late to make amends. 
While on some accounts I am sorry that you have 
concluded to marry, on others I perhaps should be 
glad : for while no station is exempt from sorrows 
which are inseparable from human life, a happy 
marriage no doubt has a preponderance of bless- 
ings, and the character and conduct of the man 

62 



HOME LIFE 

you have chosen are such as to justify any rea- 
sonable anticipations of felicity. No choice could 
have been more acceptable to me, since a choice 
had to be made, and I am sure that it will be a 
consolation to you to know that my judgment and 
my affection approve the dictates of your own. 
You have been a good child, and none can ever 
have a higher or more tender appreciation of 
your personal charms, and the graces of your 
life and demeanor than your mother and myself. 
I regret that on account of the misfortunes and 
burden of these troublous times, I shall not be 
able to do as much for you as I could wish, but 
fortunately your aspirations have never been ex- 
travagant, so that we shall, I hope, be able to 
meet your reasonable expectations. 

Of his mother he wrote Marion from Tucson 
not long before his death, saying : 

Your grandmother was born March 15, 1812, 
and will be eighty-eight years old in a few weeks. 
She is a very remarkable woman physically and 
mentally. She never had much strength, and 
her health always seemed fragile. She suffered 
greatly in her earlier life from sick headaches 
and sleeplessness. She ate but little and never 
took much exercise. She was always slight and 
delicate, and had none of the indications of long 
life. So, it would seem that longevity is an in- 

63 



HOME LIFE 

heritance, rather than an attainment, and de- 
pends little upon habits and conduct and ways of 
living. Her mind is quite as extraordinary, and 
her memory, perceptions, and interest in life have 
been preserved without abatement. While not 
highly educated, nor a great reader, nor in any 
sense a student, she has always kept acquainted 
with what was going on in the world, and her 
recollection of recent events is quite as acute as 
that of the affairs of her distant childhood and 
youth. Nothing can be more instructive and en- 
tertaining than her descriptions of the dress, and 
housekeeping, and habits of people seventy-five 
years ago, before there were any railroads, or 
steamboats, or telegraph, or telephones, or sew- 
ing machines, or electric lights, or friction 
matches, or photographs, or street cars, or any 
of the conveniences now considered so indispens- 
able in modern life. She thinks there was quite as 
much happiness and more contentment then than 
now. She was a very kind and faithful mother 
to us all, but never affectionate nor demonstra- 
tive, though no doubt she felt quite as deeply 
as those who make more fuss. I don't think she 
was very "religious" as that word is commonly 
used, though she "belonged to the church", and 
attended worship regularly till recently. She 
was very ambitious and "practical". She liked 
wealth, and success, and rank, and station, and 

64 



HOME LIFE 

good clothes, but she has the philosophic spirit, 
and never to my recollection, found fault with 
fortune, nor complained because any of her 
wishes were not gratified. 



65 



RELIGION 



RELIGION 
I. 

Ingalls, like Omar, believed that no man ever 
pierced the secret, — that no man ever drew aside 
the veil of fate. With Taine, he was of the 
opinion "that primitive religions are born at the 
awakening of human reason, during the richest 
blossoming of human imagination, at a time of 
the fairest artlessness and the greatest credulity. 
— that whatever develops credulity side by side 
with a poetical conception of the world engen- 
ders religion". 

To the bold and independent intellect of In- 
galls these principles appealed. The origin of 
religions and the development of deities, as stated 
by Renan, appeared reasonable to Ingalls. He did 
not, however, accept fully the views of these 
brilliant Frenchmen. 

To him the fact that the soul was prone to 
grope in the obscurity veiling the purpose and 
destiny of man was proof that there was some 
attribute in his spiritual nature which compelled 

69 



RELIGION 

the birth of primitive religions at the awakening 
of human reason, — a cause lying behind the 
unrent veil, an inherent desire for immortality, 
a profound aspiration. 

Upon this attribute, dimly discerned, faintly 
felt, feebly manifested, man reared such rude 
systems as his environment enabled him to evolve. 

These conceptions did not carry Ingalls into 
the hopeless fields of materialism. Beyond the 
position that our knowledge is not sufficient to 
warrant any definite determination of the su- 
preme problems of man's existence here he did 
not go. Standing back in that era of "the awak- 
ening of human reason" to which this process 
carried him, he could see what our progenitors, 
for want of human experience, could not discern, 
— the wrecks of numberless systems abandoned 
along the course over which mankind had taken 
way. Seeing these, he realized the futility of 
formulating metaphysical schemes. 

To sustain his "profound aspiration" to im- 
mortality he, like Plato, had recourse to reason. 
"Inasmuch," he says, "as both force and matter 
are infinite and indestructible, and can neither be 
added to nor subtracted from, it follows that in 

70 



KELIGION 

some form we have always existed, and that we 
shall continue in some form to exist forever." 

This lacks only the principle of evolution to 
constitute a basis for endless progress. But this 
essential he seems to reject. "Evolution, metemp- 
sychosis, reincarnation, are not beliefs. They are 
parts of speech, interesting only to the compiler 
of lexicons." 

His strongest terms of disapprobation became 
a confession to lack of knowledge. He did not 
deny nor condemn, — his position forbade that. 
He did not know. Beyond that he could never 
go. "Whence we came into this life no one 
knows," he exclaims. Perhaps the most definite 
and confident utterance of Ingalls on this point 
is to be found in his oration delivered in the 
Senate on the death of Senator Hill, of Georgia. 
He was then at the zenith of his intellectual 
power, and what he said in that period of his life 
must be regarded as his settled conviction : 

Ben Hill has gone to the undiscovered country. 

Whether his journey thither was but one step 
across an imperceptible frontier, or whether an 
interminable ocean, black, unfluctuating, and 
voiceless, stretches between these earthly coasts 
and those invisible shores — we do not know. 

71 



RELIGION 

Whether on that August morning after death 
he saw a more glorious sun rise with unimagin- 
able splendor above a celestial horizon, or whether 
his apathetic and unconscious ashes still sleep in 
cold obstruction and insensible oblivion — we 
do not know. 

Whether his strong and subtle energies found 
instant exercise in another forum ; whether his 
dexterous and disciplined faculties are now con- 
tending in a higher Senate than ours for suprem- 
acy; or whether his powers were dissipated and 
dispersed with his parting breath — we do not 
know. 

Whether his passions, ambitions, and affections 
still sway, attract, and impel ; whether he yet re- 
members us as we remember him — we do not 
know. 

These are the unsolved, the insoluble problems 
of mortal life and human destiny, which prompted 
the troubled patriarch to ask that momentous 
question for which the centuries have given no 
answer: "If a man die, shall he live again?" 

Every man is the center of a circle whose fatal 
circumference he cannot pass. Within its nar- 
row confines he is potential, beyond it he perishes ; 
and if immortality be a splendid but delusive 
dream, if the incompleteness of every career, even 
the longest and most fortunate, be not supple- 
mented and perfected after its termination here, 

72 



RELIGION 

then he who dreads to die should fear to live, for 
life is a tragedy more desolate and inexplicable 
than death. 

These principles were reiterated by Ingalls less 
than four months before his death in his article 
—"The Immortality of the Soul". That he died 
immovable in their truth there can be no doubt. 



II. 



Of Jesus of Nazareth, Ingalls said, "He is the 
central character of human destiny, the one colos- 
sal figure of human history." But in this he is 
not to be understood as subscribing to the plan of 
redemption of souls said by His followers to have 
been proclaimed by Him. Rather, His teachings 
are to more and more prove the germs from 
which political progress and higher civilization 
must develop. 

The central idea of Christianity, as now pro- 
mulgated, is the resurrection. "If Christ be not 
raised, your faith is vain," wrote Paul to the 
Corinthians, and, he continues, "they also which 
are fallen asleep in Christ are perished." "If 
in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are 

73 



RELIGION 

of all men most miserable," he warns the world- 
ly-minded. "I am the resurrection and the life, 
saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though 
he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever 
liveth and believeth in me shall never die," 
wrote the Beloved Disciple. The resurrection of 
the dead, as held by the Church, rests mainly on 
the utterances of the great apostle to the Gentiles. 
But for himself, Ingalls swept this away with a 
stroke of his pen, — "Saint Paul, the greatest of 
the teachers of Christianity, could only respond 
by a misleading analogy. He knew the wheat 
which is reaped is not that which is sown. The 
harvest is a succession, not a resurrection." 

But even here Ingalls did not lapse into the 
despair of atheism. Writing to his father of the 
death of his son Addison, he said: "His sweet 
soul vanished into the Unknown. Yesterday be- 
neath the clear sky that brooded above us like 
a covenant of peace, we laid him to sleep beside 
his sister, to wait the solution of the great mys- 
tery of existence when earth and sea shall give 
up their dead. That I may meet him again in 
the great Hereafter is a profound aspiration 
rather than a living faith, but if eternity will 

74 



RELIGION 

release its treasures, sometime I shall claim my 
own." 

He regarded the question of Job, "If a man die, 
shall he live again?" the everlasting interrog- 
atory. 

A Supreme Being, Ingalls seemed to admit, but 
of what order, nature, degree, glory, he did not 
affirm. "Faith in a Supreme Being," he said, "in 
immortality and the compensations of eternity 
conduces powerfully to social order by enabling 
men to endure with composure the injustice of 
this world in the hope of reparation in that which 
is to come." 

The position finally assumed by Ingalls was 
due somewhat to a revulsion from the harsh the- 
ology of Calvin, at one time so deeply rooted in 
New England. He was to some extent a disciple 
of Carlyle, though he could never have been pre- 
vailed upon to admit it, and life became a matter 
of wonder and increasing mystery. "After all," 
he wrote his father, "whether well or ill, the long- 
est life is but a brief pulsation, like the momen- 
tary flash of a firefly in a garden at night: and 
whether its transitory torch is to be extinguished 
forever or to be relighted and burn eternally, we 
hope and dream, but know not." 

75 



RELIGION 
III. 

In the contemplation of immortality and the 
inscrutable mystery of human life Ingalls said 
that: 

Our appearance here is not voluntary. We 
are sent to this planet on some mysterious er- 
rand without being consulted in advance. Many 
of us would not have come had the opportunity 
to decline, with thanks, been presented. 

To multitudes life is an inconceivable insult 
and injury, an intolerable affront; torture and 
wretchedness indescribable from poverty, disease, 
grief, Fortune's slings and arrows; wrongs de- 
liberately inflicted by some unknown malignant 
power, as Job was tormented by the devil, with 
the consent of God, just to try him, till at last 
the troubled patriarch cursed the day he was 
born. 

"Worst of all, we are sent here under sentence 
of death. The most grievous and humiliating 
punishment man can inflict upon the criminal is 
death. 

Human tribunals give the malefactor a chance. 
His crime must be proved. He can put in his 
defense. He can appear by attorney and plead 
and take appeal. But we are all condemned to 
death beforehand. The accusation and the ac- 
cuser are unknown. An inexorable verdict has 

76 



RELIGION 

been pronounced and recorded in the secret coun- 
cils of the skies. We are neither confronted with 
the witness nor allowed a day in court. From 
the hour of birth we are beset by invulnerable 
and invisible enemies, the pestilence that walketh 
in darkness and the destruction that wasteth at 
noonday. Fatal germs, immortal bacilli, heaven- 
sent microbes, inhabit the air we breathe, the food 
we eat, the water we drink, poisoning where they 
fly and infecting where they repose. 

Science continually discloses malevolent agen- 
cies, hitherto undetected, which we vainly try to 
extirpate, or to build frail and feeble barriers 
against their depredations. 

Theology complacently announces that for the 
majority of the human race this tough world is 
the prelude to an eternity in hell. . . . 

Nature, like a witness in contempt, stands mute. 
Science returns from the remotest excursions, 
shakes its head, and, smiling, puts the question 
by. Christ contented Himself with a few vague 
and unsatisfactory generalities. . . . 

The evidence of a superintending moral pur- 
pose and design in the affairs of men are faint and 
few. The wicked prosper, the good suffer. The 
problems of sin, pain, and evil are insoluble. 
Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children 
to the third and fourth generation, making the 
innocent suffer for the offences of the guilty, is 

77 



RELIGION 

an unjust and cruel law that ought to be repealed. 
Civilization has long since rejected the principle 
from human jurisprudence. Even treason, the 
highest crime known to its code, no longer works 
corruption of blood or forfeiture of estate. 

Unless man is immortal, the moral universe, so 
far as he is concerned, disappears altogether. If 
he does not survive the grave, it makes no differ- 
ence to him whether there be God or devil, or 
heaven or hell. And it must be not only a sur- 
vival, but a continuity of consciousness as well, if 
the evil are to be punished and the good rewarded 
hereafter. 

Ingalls believed mankind was making progress 
in the science of religion — in the science of god- 
making. He knew what every priest is anxious 
that his parishioner shall never know — that the 
term "religion" is of universal application, and 
that it embraces the crude incantations and de- 
ceptions of the Medicine Man as well as the ten- 
ets of Christianity. Savage practices no more 
condemn the one than do refined cruelties and 
polished amenities establish the other: 

There was a profound truth in the declaration 
of Voltaire, that if there was no God, it would 
be necessary for man to invent one. God is indis- 
pensable [to man]. As the race advances, it 

78 



KELIGION 

clothes God with higher attributes and dignifies 
Him with more lofty functions. The gloomy and 
inexorable God of the Puritans has disappeared. 
He has been succeeded by a Supreme Being of in- 
finite mercy, tenderness, and goodness; a ruler, a 
law-maker, subject to limitations and restraints 
imposed by His own perfections. 

Opposition to Christianity, or any other re- 
ligion, is no indication of infidelity, he argued, 
"but rather the strongest evidence of the relig- 
ious spirit of the times, . . . the hunger and 
thirst for knowledge about what can never be 
known". 

So impenetrable did he regard the veil which 
hides the future that he expected another Christ 
and new revelations. But even these will prove 
insufficient and unsatisfactory, as have all others, 
for in this field alone has no progress been made, 
as witness his belief declared in his estimate of 
the book of Job: 

The book of Job is the oldest, and in my judg- 
ment, the highest production of the human intel- 
lect. It is especially interesting because it shows 
that humanity at the dawn of history was en- 
gaged in considering the same problems that per- 
plex us now — immortality, the existence of evil, 

79 



RELIGION 

the afflictions and misfortunes of the good in this 
world, and the prosperity of the wicked. We 
have made no progress in solving these problems. 
The barriers are insurmountable. The centuries 
are silent. The soul struggles, aspires, beats its 
wings against the bars, flutters, and disappears. 

All this is grounded in human experience — 
nay, more than that, — in the inherent qualities 
of the nature of man. And, Ingalls believed — 
rightly — that sin, wickedness, wretchedness are 
necessary to our progress — indispensable to our 
very existence: 

Poverty will never be abolished, nor misery, nor 
pain, nor disease. They are inseparable from 
humanity. Were all men contented and secure, 
progress would cease and the race would expire. 

This, in a more delicate and cautious way, is 
the ruthless trampling under foot of temporary 
systems and agreed conventionalities so extens- 
ively practiced by Carlyle. Completed and sta- 
tionary institutions for man's redemption Ingalls 
regarded with that independence and that reck- 
less scorn peculiar to his Scandinavian-Germanic 
ancestry. 



80 



RELIGION 
IV. 

The contemplation of the mystery of this life 
did not react upon Ingalls to produce melancholy 
or misanthropy. In a letter to his wife, he said, 
"Life to me is so vivid and intense, like an eager 
flame, that pain, disease, weakness, annihilation 
seem monstrous and intolerable." 

He loved life. Its enjoyment was precious to 
him, some expression of which we find in his 
writings. As early as 1872, in a letter to his 
father on a Thanksgiving anniversary, he said: 

I have thought much to-day of the long career 
of my life, which has been extended so long be- 
yond my early anticipations, and rendered con- 
spicuous by so many blessings which I am con- 
scious I have not deserved and which I never 
hoped to enjoy. Standing upon the uplands of 
middle life, my childhood and youth seem like 
the experiences of another planet, and though I 
have suffered much from the tortures of dis- 
turbed functions, diseased nerves, sensibilities un- 
naturally acute, the war in my members between 
the spirit and the flesh, the agonies of conflict be- 
tween unconquerable appetites, passions, impulses 
and ambitions, and a conscience too sensitive to 
submit to moral anodynes, yet I have much to 

81 



KELIGION 

recall with gratitude to some Benign Power that 
has given me a moderate measure of worldly 
success, a modest competence, and a reasonable 
assurance of the esteem of my fellows; a happy 
home, and hopeful children whom it shall be my 
chief care to teach to shun the errors that have 
been my bane. 

I have thought much also of that benevolent 
destiny that has protracted an existence as a 
family, unbroken through so many years; that 
gave to us in our early years the benefit and 
advantage of parental restraint and care, and has 
given to you the opportunity of seeing the prac- 
tical result of your anxiety and toil, and the es- 
tablishment of your children in reputable posi- 
tions in widely disassociated spheres of life. 

As time passes on, the burden of existence be- 
comes more grievous : these anniversaries, once 
so bright and festal, grow ominous with shadows, 
and have a deep, sad and solemn significance. 
Laden with the inexpressible pathos, the yearning 
regrets, the farewells of the past, its melancholy 
and its external pain, they also point with pro- 
phetic augury to the future, near or far, when 
anniversaries shall be no more. How happy they 
who live so that they are not afraid to die ! — I 
trust that we may know many returns of this 
ancient festival, but more than that, I hope that 
when on some future Thanksgiving, the last sur- 

82 



RELIGION 

vivor of us all recalls the vivid memories of 
those who have gone before, no grief may dim 
his vision save that which separation always 
brings, and that he may confidently and grate- 
fully anticipate the hour which shall summon 
him to join a reunited family in a brighter world 
than this : a world which shall seem as the glori- 
ous wakening from a fevered dream, where sor- 
row has no dominion, where distance cannot sep- 
arate, where time cannot chill, and the tragic 
limitations of earthly being are forever unknown. 

The references here to "a reunited family in a 
brighter world, where sorrow has no dominion", 
and ''time cannot chill", are reversions to the 
Calvinistic sermons impatiently heard on Thanks- 
givings in youth in New England, and must not 
be taken as expressing his own state or belief. 

The death of Garfield, his kinsman, aroused in 
Ingalls the realization of the futility of earthly 
power and grandeur. In a letter to his father 
were these expressions penned: 

To one unaware of the tragedy of July, it would 
seem incredible that within three months, the 
chosen ruler of a great nation had been buried 
amid the grief of all the civilized world, and 
that the trial of his assassin was proceeding in 
sight of the Capitol from which the remains of 

83 



RELIGION 

the victim were so lately borne to their last re- 
pose. The moralist and the philosopher might 
find abundant food for thought, nor could the 
cynic restrain his sneer at the spectacle presented 
by the thoughtless theory of ambitious aspirants 
who have so readily transferred their allegiance 
to the new President who sits in the Council 
Chamber so lately vacated by the dead. The 
emptiness of fame, the hollow mockery of friend- 
ship, the vanity of ambition, the worthlessness of 
power, the insignificance of man, never had a 
more striking illustration. ' ' The King is dead ! 
Long live the King ! ' ' — And yet, notwithstanding 
the wretchedness of humanity, and the evils of 
human life, there is something attractive about 
existence. When digestion is good and the nerves 
neither too lax nor too tensely strung, it is pleas- 
ant to eat a good dinner, to get a little drunk, to 
smoke a good cigar, to talk with bright men and 
women, to drive in the woods, to stroll in the sun, 
to get into a row occasionally if you can be on 
top, to sleep and wake, to play with children, to 
read good books, and wonder what life means, 
and to what it leads, how we got here and where 
we are going; a perplexing riddle which has not 
been solved. 

This was the blind beating of the immortal in 
man against the bars of the earthly prison of this 

84 



RELIGION 

life with its vexing and distracting limitations. Of 
the same nature is the " everlasting interroga- 
tory" of Job. The same problems troubled the 
Preacher of Wisdom, who saw "in human en- 
quiry no attainment, in the succession of events 
no advance, in the succession of human genera- 
tions no continuity", and who saw the tragedy 
of Life in the "Coming of the Evil Days", when 

"The years draw nigh, 
When thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them: 

Or ever the sun 

And the light, 

And the moon, 

And the stars, 
Be darkened, 
And the clouds return after the rain: 

In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, 

And the strong men shall bow themselves, 

And the grinders cease because they are few, 

And those that look out of the windows be darkened, 

And the doors shall be shut in the street; 

When the sound of the grinding is low, 

And one shall rise up at the voice of a bird, 

And all the daughters of music shall be brought low; 

Yea, they shall be afraid of that which is high, 
And terrors shall be in the way: 

And the almond tree shall blossom, 
And the grasshopper shall be a burden, 
And the caperberry shall burst: 

85 



RELIGION 

Because man goeth to his long home, 
And the mourners go about the streets: 

Or ever the silver cord be loosed, 

Or the golden bowl be broken, 

Or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, 

Or the wheel broken at the cistern: 

And the dust return to the earth, 

As it was; 
And the spirit return unto God 

Who gave it". # 

* Dr. Moulton's version. Quoted from his Ecclesiastes. 

V. 

As his years increased a sense of death abode 
■with Ingalls. And so it does with every reflect- 
ing man. It is said that Egyptians of the upper 
class kept memory and thought of death ever 
present by the exhibition at feasts of a human 
skeleton. To the Anglo-Saxons death is the King 
of Terrors, but to that people has been given 
that fortitude with which death is contemplated 
in quiescence and with tranquillity. In this mood 
Ingalls wrote his wife near the close of the year 
1890: 

The clouds are steamy and still. The world is 
so lovely at its best, and life so delightful, that I 
dread the thought of leaving it. I have seen and 

86 



RELIGION 

experienced so little of what may be seen and 
known that it seems like closing a volume of 
which I have only glanced at the title-page. But 
so many are taking their leave, and I have al- 
ready survived so large a number of my contem- 
poraries, that I must contemplate my departure 
with the rest. I thought as I lay in bed this 
morning, having waked early, what an uncivil 
host life is, to invite us to an entertainment which 
we are compelled to attend whether we like it or 
not, and then to unceremoniously take us by the 
arm and bow us out into the night, stormy and 
dismal, to go stumbling about without so much as 
a lantern to show us the way to another town. — 
To continue in the same strain of reflection, our 
ground in the cemetery should have a "Monu- 
ment". I hate these obelisks, urns, and stone 
cottages, and should prefer a great natural rock 

— one of the red boulders — known as the "lost 
rocks" of the prairie — porphyry from the North 

— brought down in glacier times — with a small 
surface smoothed down — just large enough to 
make a tablet in which should be inserted the 
bronze letters of our name — "Ingalls" — and 
nothing else. 

And, so, this man of dilatory habit, but of mind 
acute and sensitive, tensely-strung and cast of 
the genius of the Saxons, of whom he came, went 

87 



RELIGION 

down to the grave without fear — in reverence 
and in agnosticism. With Omar of old, he be- 
lieved "this world's phantasmagoria is a vision, 
which rises from a boundless ocean, and sinks 
again into the same ocean from which it arose". 



88 



LITERATURE 



LITERATURE 



Ingalls did his best literary work before his 
election to the Senate. After that other matters 
occupied his time and diverted his attention. 
But for many years it was his cherished ambi- 
tion to retire from politics and lead a sort of soli- 
tary secluded life, the details of which were vague 
and indefinite in his own mind. Fortunately this 
longing of the soul was never gratified. Life has 
its times and its seasons, the mind its epochs and 
its eras. What a man may excel in at one period 
he may not be able to achieve in another, even 
though his powers be not abated nor his intellect 
diminished. Emotion depends much on precari- 
ous circumstance, and the capacity for its expres- 
sion may be lost or smothered by baser things. 
The mind treasures former joys, and as age creeps 
on reversion to them increases. Man becomes 
reflective, and the contemplation of the events of 
early life becomes his chief pleasure. Fancy flat- 
ters him with the delusion that former achieve- 

91 

—7 



LITERATURE 

ments could be successfully repeated, though the 
black raven of experience croaks the hoarse and 
disconsolate note — Nevermore ! 

The literary reputation of Ingalls must rest 
mainly upon his writings known as the "Kansas 
Magazine Articles," a series of essays written for 
a chance publication of the prairies, a brilliant 
child of Kansas, of birth premature by a full 
half-century. 

The inspiration for these charming productions 
Ingalls found in Kansas. He had previously writ- 
ten much, but it was flat and stale, — nothing that 
the world cares to see or preserve. He had not 
then been stirred. But, standing on the rugged 
bluffs of the winding Missouri he was powerfully 
moved. The vast expanse of rolling prairie and 
woodland, the illimitable azure reaches where 
"Triangles of wild geese harrowed the blue fields 
of the sky", the purple haze mellowing the hori- 
zon into an amethyst ocean, aroused in him emo- 
tions which he described and made immortal. 

Combined with the glory of the landscape were 
the rattle of steel and the clash of civilizations. 
The Puritan and the Cavalier, in their migra- 
tions westward, met at the cross-roads of Kansas. 

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LITERATURE 

Men marched and fought, slew one another and 
devastated fields, pulled down houses and ruined 
homes. Flames rolling red against the midnight 
sky told of towns sacked and settlements de- 
stroyed. In the scathing arraignment of border- 
ruffians Ingalls perched on crags of sarcastic de- 
nunciation inaccessible to any coming after him. 
The first of these graphic delineations he termed 
"Catfish Aristocracy". Only in one instance did 
he ever surpass it. Its scene was laid on one of 
those temporary and precarious flats cast up by 
the Missouri River, the building of which no 
other writer need now ever attempt to describe : 

Born of a snag, a wreck, an adverse gale, a 
sunken floater, anything that can afford brief 
lcdgment for accumulation, these accretions may 
dissolve and vanish with the next "rise", or they 
may mysteriously elevate themselves above the 
level of the water, give root to wind-sown willows, 
cottonwoods, elms, and sycamores, an anonymous 
growth of feculent herbage and festering, crawl- 
ing weeds, but never a bright blade of wholesome 
grass, a lovely bud or flower. 

Malarious brakes and jungles suddenly exhale 
from the black soil, in whose loathsome recesses 
the pools of pure rain change by some horrible 
alchemy into green ooze and bubbly slime, breed- 

93 



LITERATURE 

ing reptiles and vermin that creep and fly, infect- 
ing earth and air with their venom, fatal alike 
to action and repose. Gigantic parasites smother 
and strangle the huge trunks they embrace, turn- 
ing them into massive columns of verdure, chang- 
ing into crimson like that of blood when smitten 
by the frosts of October. Pendulous, leafless vines 
dismally sway from the loftiest trees like gallows 
without their tenants. Deadly vapors, and snaky, 
revolting odors, begotten of decay, brood in the 
perpetual gloom. 

If not too soon undermined by the insidious 
chute gnawing at its foundation of quaking quick- 
sands, this foul alluvion becomes subject to local 
government, and, under a mistaken idea that it is 
a component part of this sure and firm-set earth, 
is surveyed and taxed. Its useless forests are 
deadened, and the ruined boles stand like grizzly 
phantoms in the waste. A zig-zag pen of rotten 
rails creeps round a hovel of decayed logs with 
mud-daubed interstices that seem to spring like 
a congenial exhalation from the ground. In the 
uncouth but appropriate phraseology of its deni- 
zens, it is "cleared bottom", and has become the 
abode of the catfish aristocrat. It was amid 
such surroundings that I first met Shang, the 
Grand Duke of this order of nobility. Thus he 
had always lived; thus his ancestors, if he had 
any; and thus he and his successors, heirs, and 

94 



LITERATURE 

assigns will continue to live till education, relig- 
ion, and development shall render him and his 
congeners as impossible as the monsters that tore 
each other in the period of the Jurassic group. 

"Shang, the Grand Duke" of catfish aristoc- 
racy, was representative of a type of border char- 
acters. Of this type Ingalls continues: 

Perhaps the most marked and ineradicable out- 
ward distinction is the manner in which they re- 
spond to a question imperfectly understood. The 
one, squirting a gourdful of tobacco juice into the 
jimson-weeds, with a prolonged, rising inflection, 
drawls out, "Whi-i-ieh?" The other stops whit- 
tling, or lays down The Kansas Magazine, and 
jerks out, "Haouw?" 

Beware of the creature that says "Which?" 
and shun the vicinage wherein he dwells! He 
builds no school-house. He erects no church. To 
his morals the Sabbath is unknown. To his in- 
tellect the alphabet is superfluous. His premises 
have neither barn, nor cellar, nor well. His crop 
of corn stands ungathered in the field. He 
"packs" water half a mile from the nearest 
branch or spring. His perennial diet is hog, 
smoked and salted in the summer, and fresh at 
"killin' time". He delights in cracklins and 
spare-ribs. Gnashing his tusks upon the impene- 
trable mail of his corn-dodger, he sighs for the 

95 



LITERATURE 

time of "roas'n-eers". He has a weakness for 
' ' cowcumbers " and "watermelons"; but when he 
soars above the gross needs of his common nature 
and strives to prepare a feast that shall rival the 
banquets of Lucullus, he spreads his festive Cot- 
tonwood with catfish and pawpaws. 

From such a protoplasm, or physical basis of 
life, proceeds an animal, bifid, long-haired, unac- 
customed to the use of soap, without conscience 
or right reason, gregarious upon bottom lands, 
where they swarm with unimaginable fecundity. 
In time of peace they unanimously vote the Demo- 
cratic ticket. During the war they became guer- 
rillas and bushwhackers under Price, Anderson, 
and Quantrill; assassins; thugs; poisoners of 
wells; murderers of captive women and children; 
sackers of defenseless towns ; house-burners ; 
horse-thieves ; perpetrators of atrocities that 
would make the blood of Sepoys run cold. 

The catfish aristocrat is pre-eminently the sa- 
loon-builder. Past generations and perished races 
of men have defied oblivion by the enduring 
structures which pride, sorrow, or religion have 
reared to perpetuate the virtues of the living or 
the memory of the dead. Ghizeh has its pyra- 
mids; Petra its temples; the Middle Ages their 
cathedrals ; Central America its ruins ; but Pike 
and Posey have their saloons, where the patrician 
of the bottom assembles with his peers. Gathered 

96 



LITERATURE 

around a rusty stove choked with soggy drift- 
wood, he drinks sod-corn from a tin cup, plays 
"old sledge" upon the head of an empty keg, and 
reels home at nightfall, yelling through the tim- 
ber, to his squalid cabin. 

A score of lean, hungry curs pour in a canine 
cataract over the worm-fence by the horse-block 
as their master approaches, baying deep-mouthed 
welcome, filling the chambers of the forests with 
hoarse reverberations, mingled with an explosion 
of oaths and frantic imprecations. Snoring the 
night away in drunken slumber under a heap of 
gray blankets, he crawls into his muddy jeans at 
sun-up, takes a gurgling drink from a flat black 
bottle stoppered with a cob, goes to the log-pile 
by the front door, and with a dull ax slabs off an 
armful of green cottonwood to make a fire for 
breakfast, which consists of the inevitable "meat 
and bread" and a decoction of coffee burned to 
charcoal and drank without milk or sugar. An- 
other pull at the bottle, a few grains of quinine 
if it is "ager" day, a "chaw" of navy, and the 
repast is finished. The sweet delights of home 
have been enjoyed, and the spiritual creature goes 
forth, invigorated for the struggle of life, to re- 
peat the exploits of every yesterday of his ex- 
istence. 

Ingalls knew more of his hero than he revealed, 
and admitted, long afterwards, that he was bright 

97 



LITERATURE 

and extremely interesting. He had been a dra- 
goon in the Mexican War. He became "a private 
in that noble army of chivalry which marched to 
Kansas to fight the Puritan idea" in border-ruf- 
fian days. At Marysville, December 21, 1857, he 
voted twenty-five times for the Lecompton consti- 
tution before noon. His "frame was of unearthly 
longitude and unspeakable emaciation", and these 
qualities fastened on him the sobriquet of ' ' Shang- 
hai", whence Ingalls derived "Shang", though 
he says he could never discover its origin. His 
name was Jonathan Gardner Lang. He was "jug- 
fisherman, melon-raiser, truck-patch farmer, and 
town-drunkard", a later biography says. He 
lived at Sumner, and Ingalls never tired of hear- 
ing his stories, going with him sometimes in his 
boat to "jug" for catfish. He gives us this de- 
scription of his "typical grandee": 

I have heretofore alluded to Shang as the 
typical grandee of this ichthyological peerage. 
Whence he derived the appellation by which he 
was uniformly known, I could never satisfactor- 
ily ascertain. Whether it was his ancestral title, 
or merely a playful pseudonym bestowed upon 
him by some familiar friend in affection's most 
endearing hours, was never disclosed. Of his 

98 



LITERATURE 

birth, his parentage, his antecedents, it were 
equally vain to inquire. He was unintentionally 
begotten in a concupiscence as idle and thought- 
less as that of dogs or flies or swine. It has been 
surmised that he was evolved from the minor con- 
sciousness of his own squalor, but this must al- 
ways remain a matter of conjecture. 

To the most minute observer, his age was a 
question of the gravest doubt. He might have 
been thirty, he might have been a century, with 
no violation of the probabilities. His hair was a 
sandy sorrel, something like a Rembrandt interior, 
and strayed around his freckled scalp like the top- 
layer of a hayrick in a tornado. His eyes were 
two ulcers half filled with pale-blue starch. A 
thin, sharp nose projected above a lipless mouth 
that seemed always upon the point of breaking 
into the most grievous lamentations, and never 
opened save to take whiskey and tobacco in and 
let oaths and saliva out. A long, slender neck, 
yellow and wrinkled after the manner of a liz- 
ard's belly, bore this dome of thought upon its 
summit, itself projecting from a miscellaneous as- 
sortment of gents' furnishing goods, which cov- 
ered a frame of unearthly longitude and unspeak- 
able emaciation. Thorns and thongs supplied the 
place of buttons upon the costume of this Brum- 
mel of the bottom, coarsely patched beyond recog- 
nition of the original fabric. The coat had been 

99 



LITERATURE 

constructed for a giant, the pants for a pigmy. 
They were too long in the waist and too short in 
the leg, and napped loosely around his shrunk 
shanks high above the point where his fearful feet 
were partially concealed by mismated shoes that 
permitted his great toes to peer from their gaping 
integuments, like the heads of two snakes of a 
novel species and uncommon fetor. The princely 
phenomenon was topped with a hat that had 
neither band nor brim nor crown; 

"If that could shape be called which shape had none". 

His voice was high, shrill, and querulous, and 
his manner an odd mixture of fawning servility 
and apprehensive effrontery at the sight of a 
"damned Yankee Abolitionist", whom he hated 
and feared next to a negro who was not a slave. 

Contemplating with horror the possibility of 
the victory of Shang in the Kansas conflict, In- 
galls exclaims : 

It is appalling to reflect what the condition of 
Kansas would have been to-day had its destiny 
been left in the hands of Shang and those of his 
associates who first did its voting and attempted 
to frame its institutions. A few hundred mush- 
eating chawbacons, her only population, would 
still have been chasing their razor-backed hogs 
through the thickets of black-jack, and jugging 

100 



LITERATURE 

for catfish in the chutes of the Missouri and the 
Kaw. 

Shang was not wholly illiterate, for he read 
the brilliant article of which he was the hero. 
His indignation was great ; his wrath was kindled 
against the author. He resolved to "have the 
law" on his traducer, having been advised there- 
to by that tout of the law known as the "jack- 
leg", denominated in these degenerate days by 
the purulent epithet of "snitch". In his copy of 
the Kansas Magazine, Ingalls made notation of 
the settlement with Shang, as follows : 

This delineation was popularly supposed to be 
drawn from life. Its original was alleged to be 
Jonathan G. Lang, a resident of Sumner, Atchi- 
son Co., since 1858. He was a native of Kentucky 
(Carroll Co.), and was commonly known as 
"Shanghai", from the longitude of his neck and 
legs. The sketch can hardly be called an exag- 
geration, though it has some of the elements of 
caricature. Lang thought it was intended for 
him, and I finally restored the entente cordiale 
by presenting him with a sack of flour and some 
"side meat". 



101 



LITERATURE 
II. 

Of the prose compositions of Ingalls, "Blue 
Grass" is gradually taking first place — rightly 
so. Its inspiration was the same that brought 
forth "Catfish Aristocracy". Indeed, it is but 
a different side of the same subject. 

The intellect of Ingalls was restricted, but in- 
tense. In "Blue Grass" we have only the land- 
scape of Eastern Kansas and the sarcastic cruci- 
fixion of the Missourian. But by his powerful 
intellectual alchemy, Ingalls produced from these 
the most astonishing scenes and the most beau- 
tiful figures: 

Attracted by the bland softness of an afternoon 
in my primeval winter in Kansas, I rode south- 
ward through the dense forest that then covered 
the bluffs of the North Fork of Wildcat. The 
ground was sodden with the ooze of melting snow. 
The dripping trees were as motionless as gran- 
ite. The last year's leaves, tenacious lingerers, 
loath to leave the scene of their brief bravery, 
adhered to the gray boughs like fragile bronze. 
There were no visible indications of life, but the 
broad, wintry landscape was flooded with that 
indescribable splendor that never was on sea or 
shore — a purple and silken softness, that half 

102 



LITERATURE 

veiled, half disclosed the alien horizon, the vast 
curves of the remote river, the transient archi- 
tecture of the clouds, and filled the responsive 
soul with a vague tumult of emotions, pensive and 
pathetic, in which regret and hope contended for 
the mastery. The dead and silent globe, with all 
its hidden kingdoms, seemed swimming like a 
bubble, suspended in an ethereal solution of ame- 
thyst and silver, compounded of the exhaling 
whiteness of the snow, the descending glory of 
the sky. A tropical atmosphere brooded upon an 
arctic scene, creating the strange spectacle of 
summer in winter, June and January, peculiar to 
Kansas, which cannot be imagined, but once seen 
can never be forgotten. A sudden descent into 
the sheltered valley revealed an unexpected cres- 
cent of dazzling verdure, glittering like a meadow 
in early spring, unreal as an incantation, surpris- 
ing as the sea to the soldiers of Xenophon as they 
stood upon the shore and shouted "Thalatta!" 
It was Blue Grass, unknown in Eden, the final 
triumph of nature, reserved to compensate her 
favorite offspring in the new paradise of Kansas 
for the loss of the old upon the banks of the 
Tigris and Euphrates. 

Next in importance to the divine profusion of 
water, light, and air, those three great physical 
facts which render existence possible, may be 
reckoned the universal beneficence of grass. Ex- 

103 



LITERATURE 

aggerated by tropical heats and vapors to the 
gigantic cane congested with its saccharine se- 
cretion, or dwarfed by polar rigors to the fibrous 
hair of northern solitudes, embracing between 
these extremes the maize with its resolute pen- 
nons, the rice plant of Southern swamps, the 
wheat, rye, barley, oats, and other cereals, no less 
than the humbler verdure of hillside, pasture, and 
prairie in the temperate zone, grass is the most 
widely distributed of all vegetable beings, and is 
at once the type of our life and the emblem of 
our mortality. Lying in the sunshine among the 
buttercups and dandelions of May, scarcely higher 
in intelligence than the minute tenants of that 
mimic wilderness, our earliest recollections are of 
grass ; and when the fitful fever is ended, and the 
foolish wrangle of the market and forum is closed, 
grass heals over the scar which our descent into 
the bosom of the earth has made, and the carpet 
of the infant becomes the blanket of the dead. 

In the following paragraph Ingalls ascended to 
his greatest height. It is his best, — the supreme 
effort beyond which he could, in prose, never go : 

Grass is the forgiveness of nature — her con- 
stant benediction. Fields trampled with battle, 
saturated with blood, torn with the ruts of can- 
non, grow green again with grass, and carnage is 
forgotten. Streets abandoned by traffic become 

104 



LITERATURE 

grass-grown like rural lanes, and are obliterated. 
Forests decay, harvests perish, flowers vanish, but 
grass is immortal. Beleaguered by the sullen 
hosts of winter, it withdraws into the impreg- 
nable fortress of its subterranean vitality, and 
emerges upon the first solicitation of spring. Sown 
by the winds, by wandering birds, propagated by 
the subtle horticulture of the elements which are 
its ministers and servants, it softens the rude out- 
line of the world. Its tenacious fibers hold the 
earth in its place, and prevent its soluble compo- 
nents from washing into the wasting sea. It in- 
vades the solitude of deserts, climbs the inacces- 
sible slopes and forbidding pinnacles of moun- 
tains, modifies climate, and determines the his- 
tory, character, and destiny of nations. Unob- 
trusive and patient, it has immortal vigor and 
aggression. Banished from the thoroughfare and 
the field, it abides its time to return, and when 
vigilance is relaxed, or the dynasty has perished, 
it silently resumes the throne from which it has 
been expelled, but which it never abdicates. It 
bears no blazonry of bloom to charm the senses 
with fragrance or splendor, but its homely hue 
is more enchanting than the lily or the rose. It 
yields no fruit in earth or air, and yet should its 
harvest fail for a single year, famine would de- 
populate the world. 

From this sublime height he descends to the 

105 



LITERATURE 

Missourian, whose degradation he delineates and 
whose redemption he proclaims : 

A more uninviting field for the utilitarian can- 
not be imagined than one of the benighted border 
counties of Missouri, where climate, products, la- 
bor and tradition have conspired to develop a race 
of hard-visaged and forbidding ruffians, exhibit- 
ing a grotesque medley of all the vices of civiliza- 
tion unaccompanied even by the negative virtues 
of barbarism. To these fallen angels villainy is 
an amusement, crime a recreation, murder a pas- 
time. They pursue from purpose every object 
that should be shunned by instinct. To the igno- 
rance of the Indian they add the ferocity of the 
wolf, the venom of the adder, the cowardice of 
the slave. The contemplation of their deeds 
would convince the optimist that any system of 
morals would be imperfect that did not include a 
hell of the largest dimensions. Their continued 
existence is a standing reproach to the New Tes- 
tament, to the doctrines of every apostle, to the 
creed of every church. 

But even this degradation, unspeakable as it is, 
arises largely from material causes, and is sus- 
ceptible of relief. In the moral pharmacy there is 
an antidote. 

The salutary panacea is Blue Grass. 

This is the healing catholicon, the strengthen- 

106 



LITERATURE 

ing plaster, the verdant cataplasm, efficient alike 
in the Materia Medica of Nature and of morals. 

Seed the country down to blue grass and the 
reformation would begin. Such a change must 
be gradual. One generation would not witness 
it, but three would see it accomplished. The first 
symptom would be an undefined uneasiness along 
the creeks, in the rotten eruption of cottonwood 
hovels near the grist-mill and the blacksmith's 
shop at the fork of the roads, followed by a "tot- 
ing" of plunder into the "bow-dark" wagon and 
an exodus for "out West". A sore-backed mule 
geared to a spavined sorrel, or a dwarfish yoke of 
stunted steers, drag the creaking wain along the 
muddy roads, accelerated by the long-drawn 
"Whoo-hoop-a-Haw-aw-aw" of "Dad" in butter- 
nut-colored homespun, as he walks beside, crack- 
ing a black-snake with a detonation like a Der- 
ringer. "Mam" and half a score of rat-faced 
children peer from the chaos within. A rough 
coop of chickens, a split-bottom "cheer", and a 
rusty joint of pipe depend from the rear, as the 
dismal procession moves westward, and is lost in 
the confused obscurity of the extreme frontier. 
Some, too poor or too timid to emigrate, would 
remain behind, contenting themselves with a sul- 
len revolt against the census, the alphabet, the 
multiplication table, and the penitentiary. Dwell- 
ing upon the memory of past felonies, which the 

107 



LITERATURE 

hangman prevents them from repeating, they 
clasp hands across the bloody chasm. But the 
aspect of Nature and society would gradually 
change — fields widen, forests increas ; fences are 
straightened, dwellings painted, schools estab- 
lished. It is no longer disreputable to know how 
to read in words of one syllable, and to spell one's 
name. The knowledge of the use of soap imper- 
ceptibly extends. The hair, which was wont to 
hang upon the shoulders, is shorn as high as the 
ears. The women no longer ride the old roan 
"mar", smoking a cob-pipe, with a blue cotton 
sun-bonnet cocked over the left eye, but assume 
the garb of the milliner, and come to the store 
with their eggs and butter in a Jackson wagon. 
Pistols are laid aside. Oaths and quarrels are 
less frequent. Drunkenness is not so general, and 
the indiscriminate use of illicit whiskey partially 
yields to the peaceful lager and cheering wine, 
although in his festive hours the true son of the 
soil cannot forbear to occasionally kill a teacher, 
burn a school-house, or flay a negro, by way of 
facetious recreation. The second generation 
would probably discard butternut and buttermilk, 
and adopt the diet and habit of the lower classes 
in New England. The third might not be dis- 
tinguishable, without close inspection, from the 
average American gentleman. 

The only adequate characterization of the ex- 

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LITERATURE 

treme climatic range of the prairies of Kansas 
is found here. And no better description of a 
Kansas thunderstorm was ever written: 

Kansas is all antithesis. It is a land of ex- 
tremes. It is the hottest, coldest, dryest, wettest, 
thickest, thinnest country in the world. The 
stranger who crossed our borders for the first 
time at Wyandotte and traveled by rail to White 
Cloud would with consternation contrast that un- 
interrupted Sierra of rygose and oak-clad crags 
with the placid prairies of his imagination. Let 
him ride along the spine of any of those lateral 
"divides" or water-sheds whose 

"Level leagues forsaken lie, 
A grassy waste, extending to the sky", 

and he would be oppressed by the same melan- 
choly monotony which broods over those who 
pursue the receding horizon over the fluctuating 
plains of the sea. And let his discursion be 
whither it would, if he listened to the voice of 
experience, he would not start upon his pilgrim- 
age at any season of the year without an over- 
coat, a fan, a lightning-rod, and an umbrella. 

The new-comer, alarmed by the traditions of 
"the drought of '60", when, in the language of 
one of the varnished rhetoricians of that epoch, 
"acorns were used for food, and the bark of trees 
for clothing", views with terror the long success- 

109 



LITERATURE 

si on of dazzling early summer days ; days without 
clouds and nights without dew; days when the 
effulgent sun floods the dome with fierce and 
blinding radiance; days of glittering leaves and 
burnished blades of serried ranks of corn; days 
when the transparent air, purged of all earthly 
exhalation and alloy, seems like a powerful lens, 
revealing a remoter horizon and a profounder 
sky. 

But his apprehensions are relieved by the un- 
heralded appearance of a cloud no bigger than a 
man's hand, in the northwest. A huge bulk of 
purple and ebony vapor, preceded by a surging 
wave of pallid smoke, blots out the sky. Birds 
and insects disappear, and cattle abruptly stand 
agazed. An appalling silence, an ominous dark- 
ness, fills the atmosphere. A continuous roll of 
muffled thunder, increasing in volume, shakes the 
solid earth. The air suddenly grows chill and 
smells like an unused cellar. A fume of yellow 
dust conceals the base of the meteor. The jag- 
ged scimitar of the lightning, drawn from its 
cloudy scabbard, is brandished for a terrible in- 
stant in the abyss, and thrust into the affright- 
ened city, with a crash as if the rafters of the 
world had fallen. The wind, hitherto concealed, 
leaps from its ambush and lashes the earth with 
scourges of rain. The broken cisterns of the 
clouds can hold no water, and rivers run in the 

110 



LITERATURE 

atmosphere. Dry ravines become turbid torrents, 
bearing cargoes of drift and rubbish on their 
swift descent. Confusion and chaos hold undis- 
puted sway. In a moment the turmoil ceases. A 
gray veil of rain stands like a wall of granite in 
the eastern sky. The trailing banners of the 
storm hang from the frail bastions. The routed 
squadrons of mist, gray on violet, terrified fugi- 
tives precipitately fly beneath the triumphal arch 
of a rainbow whose airy and insubstantial glorj 
dies with the dying sun. 

For days the phenomenon is repeated. Water 
oozes from the air. The strands of rain are woven 
with the inconstant sunbeam. Reeds and sedges 
grow in the fields, and all nature tends to fins, 
web-feet, and amphibiousness. 

III. 

"Regis Loisel" is an account of a French trap- 
per and fur-trader of that name, who lived in 
Upper Louisiana just prior to its acquisition by 
the United States. Ingalls believed it his best ef- 
fort, another instance tending to show that an 
author is not always the most competent judge 
of the merits of his own productions. It is, in- 
deed, an exceptional composition, but its excellent 
passages are much of the same nature found in 

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LITERATURE 

all his writings — the mystery and profound 
beauty of the Valley of the Missouri. Here is a 
splendid paragraph: 

The sullen gray bars of the river were vocal 
m ith sonorous flocks of brant, halting for a night 
on their prodigious emigrations from the icebergs 
to the palms. Triangles of wild geese harrowed 
the blue fields of the sky. Regiments of pelicans 
performed their mysterious evolutions high in air 
— now white, now black, as their wings or their 
breasts were turned to the setting sun. The sand- 
hill crane, trailing the ridiculous longitude of his 
thin stilts behind him, dropped his gurgling croak 
from aerial elevations, at which his outspread 
pinions seemed but a black mote in the ocean of 
the atmosphere. In all the circumference of the 
waste wilderness beneath him, he saw no tower 
or roof or spire upon the hills of Atchison, no 
cabin on the prairie, no hollow square cleared in 
the forests of Buchanan and Platte ; heard no vi- 
bration of bells, no scream of glittering engine, 
no thunder of rolling trains, no roar of wheels, no 
noise of masses of men like distant surf tumbling 
on a rocky shore; no human trace along the 
curves of the winding river, save the thin blue 
fume that curled upward through the trees at the 
base of the bluff from the camp-fire of Regis 
Loisel. 

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LITERATURE 

The skeleton in the closet of one of the first 
families of St. Louis is thus brought to public 
view by the deft rhetoric of Ingalls: 

Laclede, the projector of the enterprise, was a 
mercantile adventurer of noble descent from Bor- 
deaux, long domiciled in New Orleans, where he 
had fallen a victim to the voluptuous charms of 
Madame Chouteau, the wife of a baker of bread 
and pies for the hungry, and a vendor of ale 
and wine for the thirsty villagers. Monsieur 
Chouteau, the baker, was presumably a crusty 
fellow, neither well bread nor in the flour of his 
youth; a dough-faced loaf-er and a pie-biter of 
the deepest dye. Be this as it may, Madame pre- 
ferred the plume and sword of her dashing lover 
to the paper cap and rolling-pin of her liege lord, 
and "lit out" in the summer of 1763 with the 
expedition for Ste. Genevieve, arriving on Novem- 
ber 3d, where they went into winter quarters. 
After a careful examination of the topography of 
the surrounding country, Laclede selected the 
present site of St. Louis, and established a trading- 
post February 15, 1764, erecting a large house 
and four stores on the levee. In due time he died, 
bequeathing his name to a street and a hotel in 
the city he founded. Madame Chouteau long sur- 
vived him, residing in St. Louis till her death, 
leaving a numerous progeny of Chouteaus, and a 

113 



LITERATURE 

name that smells sweet and blossoms in the dust. 
She was a woman of great strength of character 
and marvelous personal beauty, and ruled St. 
Louis with despotic sovereignty. 

Loisel secured a grant of land from his govern- 
ment which the United States finally recognized 
and confirmed to the amount of 38,111 acres, 
warrants for which were laid on the public 
domain in Kansas. In the litigation for the 
possession of this land which ensued Ingalls was 
retained as attorney. At the final disposition of 
the matter he was present and participating. His 
description of the proceedings must be accepted 
as one of the best accounts of frontier courts 
extant : 

And thus at last, in the strange vicissitude and 
mutation that accompanies human affairs, it 
chanced that the protracted strife finally closed in 
the courts of Nemaha, and it was there determined 
who were the "heirs of Regis Loisel". 

Had the bandage been removed from the eyes 
of the Goddess of Justice upon that wintry day, 
she would have dropped the idle scales and brand- 
ished the avenging sword. They have built her 
a stately temple since, whose harmonious and 
symmetrical mass is the poem of a landscape that 
was enchanted before a cheap railway had span- 

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LITERATURE 

tied the Nemaha with its skeleton truss, and 
dumped its black grade diagonally across the 
great military road that trailed westward through 
the village and over the level prairie toward Salt 
Lake and the Pacific Ocean. But upon the day 
aforesaid, the goddess dwelt like the apostle in 
her own hired house, a chosen sanctuary of cotton- 
wood that stood four-square to all the winds that 
blew. Here were the aegis, the palladium, the 
forum, the ermine, the immortal twelve, and all 
the paraphernalia inseparable from the admin- 
istration of law in its most primitive form — 
essential to its sanctions, the staple of its orators ; 
without which, we are assured by its ministers, the 
proud edifice of our liberties would incontinently 
topple and fall headlong from turret to founda- 
tion-stone. 

The two windows rattling in their rude case- 
ments were curtained with frost of the thickness 
and consistency of tripe. Between them, with his 
head dangerously near the rough mortar of the 
ceiling, sat his honor the judge, surveying the 
scene from an inverted packing-box, his boots 
interrupting his vision, and his chair inclined 
against the wall. The harangues of the advocates 
were enlivened by the musical clinking of glasses, 
the festal notes of the rustic Cremona, and the 
boisterous bursts of inebriated laughter from the 
doggery beneath. Planks of splintered pine, sus- 

115 



LITERATURE 

tained by a beggarly account of empty boxes, soap 
and cracker, spice and candle, from adjacent gro- 
ceries, afforded repose to a group of dilapidated 
loafers who crouched and shivered around the 
smoking stove. As they masticated their "fiat 
tobacker", they meditatively expectorated in the 
three-ply saw-dust that carpeted the floor, and 
listened to the will of Regis Loisel. 

The subtle potency of the soul of the bold 
adventurer spoke imperiously from the abyss of a 
forgotten past. His voice emanated from an un- 
known grave, across the interval of three-quarters 
of a century. His restless and uneasy ghost ani- 
mated the mysterious syllables at whose utterance 
arose the phantom of the Law, which irresistibly 
forbade intrusion upon sixty square miles of Kan- 
sas prairie, in the name and by the will of Regis 
Loisel. 

Nothing could be more beautiful than the clos- 
ing paragraph. Its splendor arises from the rever- 
sion of the author once more to the mysterious 
Missouri winding its way to the sea — an object 
of his inspiration, a manifestation of nature that 
held always for him the profoundest fascination: 

And so the drama ended. Three generations 
had passed away. The squalid hamlet had ex- 
panded into an opulent metropolis, of which his 

116 



LITERATURE 

descendants are eminent and honored citizens. 
States had sprung like an exhalation from the wil- 
derness. An intense civilization pervaded the pro- 
foundest solitudes. Nothing remained unchanged 
in the wild world of his brief life save the impas- 
sive and desolate river which wears as then, and 
will forever wear, the impervious mask of its sul- 
len mystery ; which bears as then, and will forever 
bear, the burden of its secret unrevealed, yielding 
no response to the living who tempt its inconstant 
wave, nor the dead who sleep by its complaining 
shore. 

IV. 

In the category of writings formerly specified 
we find "The last of the Jayhawkers". What his- 
tory says and what it might say could not be 
better stated than in this production: 

Had an irreverent Athenian ventured to doubt 
Silenus or denounce Priapus, he would probably 
have been received with a stormy outcry like that 
which greeted Bancroft when he ventured to dis- 
close the truth about some of the paragons of 
early American history. And yet it cannot be 
denied that the popular notion of the founders of 
the Government is as purely mythological as the 
Grecian dream of Jupiter and Minerva. With 
what awe in our boyhood do we contemplate the 

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LITERATURE 

majestic name of Washington! That benign and 
tranquil, although somewhat stolid visage, looks 
down upon us from a serene atmosphere un- 
stained with earthly passion. That venerable 
fame bears no taint of mortal frailty save in 
the juvenile episode of the hatchet, in which the 
venial error is expiated by the immortal candor of 
its confession. To our revering fancy, the massive 
form wrapped in military cloak stands forever at 
midnight upon the frozen banks of the Delaware, 
watching the patriot troops cross the icy current 
in the darkness before the grand morning of 
Trenton; or else, arrayed in black velvet small- 
clothes, resigning his commission to the Conti- 
nental Congress at Annapolis. We learn in riper 
years, with grief not unmingled with incredulity, 
that this great man was subject to ungovernable 
outbreaks of rage, that he swore like a mule- 
driver, and that he was not only the Father of his 
Country, but also of Governor Posey of Indiana. 

No highwayman ever had published a more 
satisfactory statement of his person and objects 
than this last Jayhawker: 

At this time patriotism and larceny had not 
entirely coalesced, and upon the debatable fron- 
tier between these contending passions appeared 
a race of thrifty warriors, whose souls were rent 
with conflicting emotions at the thought of their 

118 



LITERATURE 

bleeding country's wrongs and the available 
assets of Missouri. Their avowed object was the 
protection of the border. Their real design was 
indiscriminate plunder. They adopted the name 
of " Jayhawkers". 

Conspicuous among the irregular heroes who 
thus sprang to arms in 1861, and ostensibly their 
leader, was an Ohio stage-driver by the name of 
Charles Metz, who, having graduated with honor 
from the penitentiary of Missouri, assumed from 
prudential reasons the more euphonious and dis- 
tinguished appellation of "Cleveland". He was a 
picturesque brigand. Had he worn a slashed 
doublet and trunk hose of black velvet, he would 
have been the ideal of an Italian bandit. Young, 
erect, and tall, he was sparely built, and arrayed 
himself like a gentleman in the costume of the 
day. His appearance was that of a student. His 
visage was thin, his complexion olive-tinted and 
colorless, as if "sicklied o'er with the pale cast 
of thought". Black piercing eyes, finely cut fea- 
tures, dark hair and beard correctly trimmed, 
completed a tout ensemble that was strangely 
at variance with the aspect of the score of dis- 
solute and dirty desperadoes that formed his 
command. These were generally degraded ruffians 
of the worst type, whose highest idea of elegance 
in personal appearance was to have their mus- 
taches dyed a villainous metallic black, irrespec- 

119 



LITERATURE 

tive of the consideration whether its native hue 
was red or brown. It is a noticeable fact that a 
dyed mustache stamps its wearer inevitably either 
as a pitiful snob or an irreclaimable scoundrel. 

The conclusion of this article has had wide cur- 
rency, which, in fact, it deserves: 

He [the last of the Jayhawkers] continued his 
exploits for some months, but was finally driven 
to bay in one of the southern counties, and, at- 
tempting to let himself down the side of a pre- 
cipitous ravine, was shot by a soldier from 
above, the ball entering under his arm and passing 
through his body. His temporary widow took his 
sacred clay to St. Joseph, where its place of inter- 
ment is marked by a marble headstone bearing the 
usual memoranda, and concluding with the fol- 
lowing : 

"One hero less on earth, 
One angel more in heaven!" 

The unreliable character of grave-stone litera- 
ture has been the theme of frequent comment, but 
unless this ostensible eulogy was intended as a 
petrified piece of jocularity and gratuitously in- 
scribed by the sculptor, it may, perhaps, be justly 
considered the most liberal application of the 
maxim, "Nil de mortuis nisi bonum", to be 
found in any American cemetery. 



120 



LITERATURE 
V. 

Perhaps the best book-review ever published in 
Kansas was that written by Ingalls of The Sons 
of the Border, by James "W. Steele, "Deane 
Monahan". Steele was a contemporary and one 
of the editors of the Kansas Magazine, and his 
book remains one of the most charming and use- 
ful volumes dealing with the Great Southwest. 
Here Ingalls became an iconoclast with profound 
contempt for the conventionalisms we call civili- 
zation : 

Civilization is a veneer. The gentleman is a 
varnished savage. The haughty dame, the lan- 
guishing belle, are lacquered squaws. The insti- 
tutions of society are stucco upon an edifice of 
barbarism; plaster ornaments that continually 
peel and crumble, revealing through the rude 
windows of crime, disorder and violence, the 
rough frame-work of brutality and ruffianism. 
The unwritten life of every man is a continual 
protest against education, law, refinement, culture 
and obedience. Grudgingly and with reluctance 
we surrender that portion of our natural rights 
which constitutes our individual contribution to 
that fund of force which is called government. 

Children are born barbarians. The struggle for 
life develops into an intense truculence, innocent 

121 



LITERATURE 

because involuntary, and often attractive because 
accompanied by the splendid bloom of intelli- 
gence, but as relentless and careless of carnage as 
the contests of bull-dogs and wolves. 

Habit accustoms us to many limitations, but 
there are seasons to all when the restraints of 
civilization seem intolerable : when the veneer and 
the varnish crack, and the unconquerable im- 
pulses of the underlying nature demand expres- 
sion: when the daily paper, polished boots, tailor's 
garments, gauzy conversation, boohs, politics, in- 
trigues, the routine of domestic life, seem detest- 
able. 

Some, unable to endure the restraint and unable 
to burst the bonds that confine them, live tragic 
lives and die tragic deaths: others resort to the 
temporary alleviations of whiskey and keno : 
others again seek relief in communion with 
nature's visible forms, touch the earth and return 
refreshed to the repulsive strife : many abandon 
the arena and vanish into the wilderness, sail the 
sea, climb mountains, penetrate forests, inhabit 
mining camps, and participate in the turbulent 
agitation of the frontier ; exhausting the sad pain 
of existence in the superior stimulus of adventure, 
privation and random energy. 

To those whom fate, timidity, avarice, weak- 
ness, or the dominion of passions, render escape 
from civilization impossible, the story of these 

122 



LITERATURE 

wild lives absolved from the corrosion of care, 
with their happy exemption from fortune's 
fluctuations, brings an irresistible pathos, an un- 
definable regret, and a conviction that the re- 
finements of culture are purchased at too high a 
price, and that we have bartered for civilization 
something better than it brings. Perhaps it may 
be a reminiscence distilled through ancestral 
brains, like the murmur in the shell, of the time 
when we were all children of nature, and wan- 
dered in her leafy solitudes and slept upon her 
grassy breast, untroubled with the griefs, the 
depressing diseases that afflict our waking hours, 
the dreams that murder sleep. 

Perhaps it may be a conviction that it is better 
not to need a thing than to have it ; that strength 
is better than shelter; that immortality is better 
than love ; that insensibility to cold is better than 
fire ; that health is better than the most skilful 
physician and the most seductive drugs ; that life 
devoid of temptations is better than religion ; that 
the frigate-bird, poised on tireless pens above 
the ocean at midnight, in the fury of the storm, 
a thousand leagues from shore, has a more envi- 
able existence than that of the petted canary, in 
its gilded cage. The higher, the more refined the 
civilization, the more intense this protest becomes. 
It is stronger in the patrician than in the serf, but 
common to both, and to all grades between. The 

123 



LITERATURE 

earliest forms of literature are but a transcript of 
the communion of man with nature; but as he 
rises from the earth and tempts the abyss, the 
troubled yearning seeks utterance in vague cries, 
finding its highest expression in the ''Manfred" of 
Byron; its lowest in "Ned Buntline's Own", Syl- 
vanus Cobb and the swarm of subterranean 
vermin that infest the basement-story of litera- 
ture. The paroxysmal energy of American life, 
and the vast solitudes that stretch boundlessly 
away from the centers of its grandest activity, 
have developed under anomalous circumstances, 
both the evil and its remedy, and afforded peculiar 
scope for the exhibition of the sentiment to which 
we have alluded. Those writers, both in prose 
and poetry, have been most successful who have 
given voice to these vague emotions, and recalled 
man to the contemplation of the monotonous vast- 
ness of the prairies ; the stupendous elevations of 
the mountains, in whose fastnesses are born the 
mysterious rivers that crawl from horizon to 
horizon, through their dull circumference of sand, 
and the strange, wandering, nomadic lives that 
seek in these melancholy wastes, refuge from 
themselves, the balm for unspoken grief, sure 
medicine for the diseased soul. 

Thus he marshals the facts and analyzes the 
principles underlying the elegant literary struc- 

124 



LITERATURE 

ture erected by Steele. Having done this with a 
skill rare indeed, Ingalls exhibits to us the means 
employed by the author in constructing his temple. 
No master ever declared more correct principles 
than those laid down in this review. No rhetor- 
ician ever gave clearer or more accurate direc- 
tions for writing pure English, for none was ever 
better qualified to direct in that matter: 

There is a vast difference between seeing a 
thing and being able to make others see it. The 
geographer can define boundaries, name streams, 
give the altitude of mountains and the number 
of inhabitants; the geologist can describe the 
rocks; the draughtsman can furnish outlines and 
lights and shadows; but beneath all these is that 
subtle something which defies analysis; which 
cannot be described or painted or defined ; which 
individualizes every landscape, every person and 
every habit, and distinguishes it from all which 
it resembles ; which makes a portrait different 
from a photograph, and a face different from 
both; which makes a mountain more than a cata- 
logue of its physical traits; which for want of 
a better word is called "expression", but which 
is really the reflex of the soul. To capture this 
evasive but omnipresent spirit and imprison it 
in words upon the printed page, in colors on the 

125 



LITERATURE 

canvas, in tones upon the musical score, is the 
task of genius, in which success is partly the gift 
of nature, partly the work of art. It is not enough 
to reproduce the impressions made upon the eye 
or the ear : the vision must be introverted and de- 
pict the images cast through the senses upon the 
curtain in the darkened chamber of the brain. 
This, in an eminent degree, has been accomplished 
by Mr. Steele. 

Of the excellent delineation made by Steele of 
the coyote Ingalls takes special notice, and he 
made it serve him as a figure of speech with 
which to give an old-time political enemy, Horton, 
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a left-handed 
compliment that was none the less blistering be- 
cause brief and indirect: 

For a cruel, merciless portraiture of a thievish, 
cowardly enigma in animalism, commend us to 
' ' Coyotes ' '. It is as clear as a cameo. Literature 
is done with this varmint. Nothing more can be 
said about him. There is one human coyote at the 
present time in Kansas politics who could main- 
tain libel on this monograph were it not for the 
constitutional provision allowing the truth to be 
given in evidence. 



126 



LITERATURE 
VL 

OPPORTUNITY. 

His Sonnet "Opportunity" is the chief stone, 
the "head of the corner", in the monument of 
literary fame builded by Ingalls. Indeed, alone, 
it would entitle him to immortal glory and 
renown. 

In discussing it, the charge that he copied it 
from a similar effort by an Italian must be con- 
sidered. 

Dr. Nicoli Gigliotti, an inhabitant of Erie, Pa., 
set up claim to this poem, saying that he wrote 
the original of it in Italian in 1887, and pub- 
lished it in La Sveglia and Mignon, of Naples, 
Italy; in Flora Mirabilis, of Turin; and in Le 
Conversazioni Delia Domencia, of Milan. He also 
claims to have published it in La Gius.tizia, 
Denver, Colorado. After the last publication he 
sent, so he says, a copy of his poem to Ingalls, 
together with a translation into English made by 
Martin Battle, a disciple of Henry George. Dr. 
Guiseppo Coloni, editor, furnished a certificate to 
the effect that he had published "II Fato", the 
poem of Gigliotti, in Flora Mirabilis, in 1887. 

127 



LITERATURE 

Dr. Gigliotti published three volumes of poems, 
but his "II Fato" is not found in them. As a 
reason for this strange omission the learned 
doctor says that he was not satisfied with the 
form of the poem. If even this were true it is 
difficult to understand why he sent a copy of 
it to Ingalls. And it fails to appear that he was 
an acquaintance of Ingalls. To his most intimate 
friends Ingalls never spoke of an acquaintance by 
the name of Gigliotti. It is very improbable that 
he ever heard of the Italian poet. 

The matter was the subject of much newspaper 
controversy, and the foregoing is written mainly 
from a statement of the case made by the Kansas 
City Star at the time. 

The poem which the Italian claims to have 
published in 1887 is given: 

IL FATO 

Arbito io sono dell' uman destino, 

Fama, grandezza, amor mi son vassalli, 

Per campagne e citta folle cammino, 

Batto a ogni porta, e corro nuovi calli. 

Se in letargo, ti desta. Se nel vino 

Le cure affoghi e ti son dolci i falli, 
T'alza e mi segni. II fato son. Meschino 

Chi, non viene con me. Gli do cavalli. 

128 



LITERATURE 

Gioie, grandezza, onor, donne e piacere. 
Tutto gli obbedira men che la morte. 
Vieni. Approfitta del mio buon volere. 

Solo uria volta io batto alle tue porte. 
Io Non Ti Seguo — rispos' io — II Pensiebe 
Sol rendd 1' uomo awenturato e forte! 

The English translation which Dr. Gigliotti says 
he furnished Ingalls follows: 

THE FATE. 

Master I am of human destinies. 

Fame, greatness, love are my servants. 

Cities and fields Foolishly I walk. 

I knock at every door but once, and I run to new pathways. 

If sleeping, wake. If feasting 
You try to kill your troubles with wine and sin: 
Rise and follow me. I am the fate. Woe 
To whom does not follow me. I give him [who does] 
horses, 

Gold, fame, honor, women and pleasure. , 

He will conquer every foe save death. 

Rise; hang to the opportunity which I offer to you. 

I am revengeful. I knock unbidden but once at every door. 
I stay here. "Leave me alone", I answered, "Thought 
And thought alone makes every man happy and strong". 

Ingalls was accused in the public prints un- 
friendly to him of plagiarism on another occasion. 
Senator Vest of Missouri and others interested 
in the justice or injustice of such a charge against 
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LITERATURE 

a public man of brilliant parts gave the subject 
much attention. All acquitted Ingalls. They 
could detect no literary theft by comparison of 
the Ingalls production with the original from 
which his detractors alleged it was taken; and 
Senator Vest said so over his signature. 

Now, the truth is, Ingalls never was guilty of 
plagiarism. If his compositions bore resemblance 
to the cast of another it arose from the fact that 
human expression is limited in form. Philosophic 
contemplation of the mysteries of our existence 
begets emotions which must reveal themselves 
along only certain lines. Similarities must often 
occur in productions of this nature. 

Many of the friends of Senator Ingalls were 
perturbed when Dr. Gigliotti made his claim, 
some believing that the Italian had made his 
case — at least that Ingalls had seen the poem, 
"II Fato", before giving final form to his "Oppor- 
tunity". This did not imply that the brilliant 
sonnet was not the product of the genius of 
Ingalls, but only that the power of suggestion is 
sometimes sufficient to be responsible for the un- 
intentional use of an alien expression for an idea 
in the most honest and original of men. Dr. Gigli- 

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LITERATURE 

otti was of this opinion, and he distinctly says 
that he does not accuse Ingalls of plagiarism. For 
a time the writer held this to be the reason for 
the resemblance to be found in the two poems. 
But notes in reference to conversations had with 
Ingalls in 1884 when we were thrown much to- 
gether in an exciting political campaign in Wyan- 
dotte County bring to memory that even at that 
time he had in mind the composition later 
expressed in elegant and perfect diction. He had 
reduced it to writing, but it is not recalled that 
it was in the form of verse — rather, that it was 
not. Doubtless many of his friends saw it as 
early as that, for opportunity was a favorite 
topic with him. Such a poem is not struck off at 
a sitting, but is the result of years of meditation 
and experience. The author remembers to have 
taken issue with the Senator as to the sentiments 
of his production. Mrs. Ingalls says he wrote it 
and re-wrote it for years before its publication 
over his signature in Truth in 1891. And this 
agrees with his known habit. He was, in literary 
work, ever over-cautious. This was shown in the 
preparation of his Kansas Magazine articles, 
which he re- wrote many times. His standard was 

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LITERATURE 

the unattainable, and nothing was put forth as 
worth while until it was polished and perfect. 

"Opportunity" is the only thing Ingalls pro- 
duced in later life at all creditable or that 
posterity will care to save. And its conception 
belongs to his earlier days. Its development was 
his life's experience misinterpreted. It was sug- 
gested to him by his fortunate and unexpected 
election to the United States Senate. But that 
was an event of consecution. It was his wife's 
ambition for him — not primarily his ambition. 
His marriage was the turning-point in the life 
of Ingalls, and with him, as with most men hap- 
pily married — who secure the highest blessing 
and greatest treasure in matrimony — the poetical 
effusion celebrating that event would have to 
bear the title of "Importunity". 

Of all men of his time Ingalls turned his back 
on Opportunity oftenest. She hung desperately 
on his neck and entreated him with tears many 
times, but he did not rise before she turned away. 
It is not, however, the province of this paper to 
indicate the occasions. 

As a literary production, nothing in the English 
language surpasses "Opportunity". It will live 

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LITERATURE 

as long as man is charmed with the beautiful in 
any form. It is a diamond of purest water per- 
fectly cut: 

OPPORTUNITY. 



/ 



Master of human destinies am I! 

Fame, love and fortune on my footsteps wait. 

Cities and fields I walk; I penetrate 

Deserts and seas remote, and passing by 
Hovel and mart and palace, soon or late 
I knock unbidden once at every gate! 

If sleeping, wake: if feasting, rise before 
I turn away. It is the hour of fate, 
And they who follow me reach every state 
Mortals desire, and conquer every foe 

Save death: but those who doubt or hesitate, 
Condemned to failure, penury and woe, 

Seek me in vain and uselessly implore. 

I answer not, and I return no more! 

The sentiment of this poem is not universally 
accepted. Efforts to controvert its teaching were 
early made. None of them compare with it in 
genius of conception or skill of construction. 
Some of these responses are here shown: 

OPPORTUNITY. 

( By Walter Malone. 

They do me wrong who say I come no more 
When once I knock and fail to find you in; 

For every day I stand outside your door, 

And bid you wake, and rise to fight and win, 

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LITERATURE 

Wail not for precious chances passed away, 
Weep not for golden ages on the wane; 

Each night I burn the records of the day; 
At sunrise every soul is born again. 

Laugh like a boy at splendors that have sped, 
To vanished joys be blind and deaf and dumb; 

My judgments seal the dead past with its dead, 
But never bind a moment yet to come. 

Tho' deep in mire, wring not your hands and weep; 

I lend my arm to all who say "I can!" 
No shamefaced outcast ever sank so deep 

But yet might rise and be a man again. 

Dost thou behold thy lost youth all aghast? 

Dost reel from righteous retribution's blow? 
Then turn from blotted archives of the past 

And find the future's page as white as snow. 

Art thou a mourner? Rouse thee from thy spell; 

Art thou a sinner? Sins may be forgiven; 
Each morning gives thee wings to flee from hell, 

Each night a star to guide thy feet to heaven. 



OPPORTUNITY 
By F. O'Neill Gallagher. \ 

One searched the town and country through, 

In winter's snows and summer's heat, 
Nor was there any path but knew 

The pacings of his weary feet. 
He watched through the lingering night 

With lamp well-filled and door ajar, 
And listened lest some footfall light 

Should hint the freakish god afar. 

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LITERATURE 

The god came not. But there was one 

Who recked not of the flitting days, 
Nor any thought of deeds undone 

Disturbed the tenor of his ways. 
He toiled not, sought no goodly prize; 

E'en as he slept the god came there 
And poured before his dream-dimmed eyes 

His store of treasure, rich and fair. 

OPPORTUNITY 
I By Edward Rowland Sill. 

This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream: 

There spread a cloud of dust along a plain; 

And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged 

A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords 

Shocked upon swords and shields. A Prince's banner 

Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes. 

A craven hung along the battle's edge, 

And thought, "Had I a sword of keener steel — 

The blue blade that the King's son bears — but this 

Blunt thing!" he snapped and flung it from his hand, 

And lowering crept away, and left the field. 

Then came the King's son, wounded and sore bestead, 

And weaponless, and saw the broken sword 

Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand, 

And ran and snatched it, and with battle shout 

Lifted afresh he hewed his enemy down 

And saved a great cause that heroic day. ^s- 



As compared to the poem of Ingalls these fall 
to the place of the glow of the firefly at midnight 
when compared to the sun in the splendor of 

135 



LITERATURE 

noonday. As to the sentiment of the one and that 
of the others — aye, there's the rub ! As to these 
sentiments no agreement or determination can 
ever be made. The difference is that between 
fatalism and hope. 



136 



POLITICS 



POLITICS 
I. 

It is not the design to present here any con- 
nected or complete record of the political career 
of Ingalls. Instances will be adduced showing 
him in those crises of his course best exhibiting 
his powers and his eccentricities. 

Ingalls sought political preferment from his 
arrival in Kansas. His object at first was nothing 
more than to provide means for a very modest 
and economic subsistence. 

He was engrossing clerk of the Territorial 
Council in 1859. The same year he was elected 
a member of the convention which formed the 
present state constitution. In 1860 he was again 
clerk of the Council; also in 1861. He was a 
member and secretary of the Kepublican conven- 
tion which met at Lawrence in 1860 to select 
delegates to the National Republican convention 
at Chicago. In 1861 he was secretary of the 
State Senate, and in November of that year was 
elected from Atchison County to fill a vacancy in 
that body. September 17, 1862, he was defeated 

139 

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POLITICS 

in the Republican convention by Thomas A. Os- 
born for Lieutenant Governor; and on the 29th, 
was nominated for that place by the "Union" 
or bolting faction of the Republican party, com- 
bined with Democrats. In the election he was 
defeated, the vote being 9,023 for Osborn, and 
5,685 for Ingalls. He was associated with this 
faction until the close of the Civil AVar, being 
defeated for Lieutenant Governor a second time, 
in 1864, by James McGrew, of Wyandotte 
County, the vote being, for McGrew 12,064; for 
Ingalls 8,493. The "Union" faction charged, 
perhaps very justly, corruption in the regular 
Republican organization, and demanded reforms 
doubtless mueh needed. The "Unionists" gave 
full sanction and support to the National Admin- 
istration in the effort to end the war, charges to 
the contrary notwithstanding. In 1864 Ingalls 
was made a member of the staff of Major-General 
George W. Deitzler, Kansas State Militia, with the 
rank of Major, and served through the two-weeks 
campaign to drive General Price out of Missouri 
and Kansas. He was assigned the duties of Judge 
Advocate during his brief military service. 



140 



POLITICS 

II. 

The influence of Mrs. Ingalls on the political 
fortunes of her husband has been already referred 
to. In compliance with her wishes and judgment 
he became a candidate for United States Senator 
in 1872. The term of Senator Pomeroy was near- 
ing its close, and a successor was to be chosen 
by the Legislature which assembled in January, 
1873. Pomeroy was a candidate to succeed him- 
self, and but for one of those unexpected and en- 
tirely unforeseen occurrences incident to corrupt 
politics would have been re-elected. 

All through the preliminary period of his cam- ' 
paign Ingalls was of the opinion that Pomeroy 
could not be defeated. Not so with Mrs. Ingalls. 
A woman will undertake the most desperate en- 
terprises with sanguine composure and faith in 
final triumph. The peculiar quality of her men- 
tality called intuition enables her to detect com- 
ing events which men declare impossible and the 
expectation of which preposterous. Mrs. Ingalls 
was confident of her husband's success, although 
she was wholly unable to give any satisfactory 
reason for her faith. 

Among the supporters of Ingalls there was 

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POLITICS 

a shrewd man of affairs who kept his own coun- 
sel. He knew that Pomeroy ought to be beaten, 
and he also knew that, pursuing ordinary political 
methods, the opposition could not defeat him. He 
alone conceived the plot and laid the snare which 
accomplished the downfall of Pomeroy. York 
acted entirely under his directions, and well did 
he play the part assigned him. Genius often 
consists of the ability to select suitable subordi- 
nates. Every step in the destruction of Pomeroy 
was planned with cool deliberation and executed 
with grim and relentless determination. Neither 
Ingalls nor the supporters of his aspirations knew 
the origin of the catastrophe that crushed Pom- 
eroy, and they, one and all, were as completely 
surprised at his spectacular annihilation as was 
"Old Beans" himself. York did not know what 
he was doing, and never dreamed that his action 
was to elect Ingalls. 

Perhaps there never was a more profound sen- 
sation in any deliberative body than that pro- 
duced in the Kansas Legislature when York, pale 
and trembling, placed on the Speaker's table 
$7,000 which he said Senator Pomeroy had paid 
over to him on the bargain for his vote. Not that 

142 



POLITICS 

it was held improbable, for no doubt many others 
present were in possession of similar or larger 
sums procured in the same way. In a majority of 
the elections for United States Senator the suc- 
cessful candidate wins by bribery, direct or in- 
direct — often by both in their most vile and 
degrading forms. 

The consternation and dismay created by the 
dramatic course of York resulted largely from 
the knowledge of Pomeroy's most ardent sup- 
porters that he and themselves were guilty. Had 
they not been, they would have risen to denounce 
as a political trick his tragic story. Had they 
done so, and had Pomeroy appeared then before 
the Assembly in magnificent wrath at the out- 
rage upon his honor, he might even then have 
prevailed. But only few men have such audacity. 

Chaos had come. The old regime had ended 
in an explosion entirely unexpected. There ex- 
isted no body or faction with even an adequate 
preliminary organization to take its place. Kan- 
sas politicians were dazed and at sea, and that 
is saying much, for no politicians in the world 
are more crafty, unprincipled, harder to daze and 
put at sea, brazen, or eager for the corrupting 

143 



POLITICS 

carrion of graft and spoils than is the average 
Kansas politician. Ingalls had just previously 
published his Kansas Magazine articles. They 
stamped him a genius. Their subject-matter ap- 
pealed to Kansas, for the old animosity towards 
Missouri was not yet quenched. In the demoral- 
ization prevailing he kept his head, said little, 
and stood immovable and aloof from hastily- 
formed cliques which were no sooner formed than 
they dissolved into thin air, and steadily gained 
ground. Sentiment for his election grew from the 
close of York's speech, and within thirty minutes 
it crystallized, consolidated, became an aggressive 
demand, and his success was assured. Men voted 
for him because they had read "Catfish Aristoc- 
racy", and some had no other reason. His elec- 
tion was practically unanimous. 

III. 

At the end of his term Ingalls was a candidate 
for re-election. The Legislature to choose his 
successor was elected in 1878. Strong opposition 
to Ingalls developed, and his election was se- 
cured with difficulty, but he finally prevailed. 
Charges of bribery and corruption were preferred 

144 



POLITICS 

against him, and the whole matter was trans- 
ferred to the United States Senate for adjudica- 
tion. There the charges fell to the ground. They 
had grown largely from personal hatred and old 
political feuds, and that principle in Kansas pol- 
itics that no man shall be allowed to hold a place 
if he can be defeated, no matter what his worth 
to the State or Nation. The famous interview in 
which Ingalls said the purification of politics was 
an iridescent dream was a plain statement of fact 
about the conditions in Kansas applied to the 
politics of the country at large. 

The victory of Ingalls was complete, and in 
the exultation consequent upon his vindication 
he came home and delivered the most remarkable 
speech ever heard on Kansas soil. Its delivery 
was set for a certain day, and extensive arrange- 
ments were made to have a large attendance. 
Special trains from various points carried thou- 
sands to Atchison. Flambeau Clubs marched by 
the light of red fire, and "Glee Clubs" and "Mo- 
docs" sang like larks. The streets were con- 
gested with the throngs that gathered. All these, 
however, were trifling incidents. The main event 
was the speech of Ingalls. It was known that 

145 



POLITICS 

he intended to flay his adversaries, and nothing 
gives the true Kansan more pleasure than to see 
a political adversary dissected alive. In Kansas, 
politics are always and altogether personal mat- 
ters. Principle is rarely involved. Blind adher- 
ence to national party platitudes is the only 
guiding-star, in most instances, of the factions of 
all political parties. And these weak utterances 
are interpreted by each fellow and his faction to 
suit their own interests, the bosses swearing that 
they alone can properly construe them, and the 
boss-busters swearing by the Great Horn Spoon 
that the bosses are grafters, robbers and traitors. 
In this they are usually nearly right, the only 
delinquency being their failure to include them- 
selves in the same category, which is always 
remedied by the retaliating bosses. These con- 
ditions have always prevailed in Kansas, and this 
is why Kansas politics have always been rotten 
and corrupt, and why they have always borne a 
spectacular aspect. 

In this address to his constituency Ingalls had 
designed to speak from a manuscript which he 
had prepared with care. But the great demon- 
stration in his honor carried him off his feet. 

146 



POLITICS 

In no other place in the world is the "band 
wagon" in such demand as in Kansas politics. In 
the hosts passing in review before Ingalls were 
hundreds of obscure and forsworn culprits who 
burrowed like rats in filth to effect his defeat, 
but now hilariously demonstrative in their allegi- 
ance, each detailing how he had labored dili- 
gently in season and out of season for the election 
of the man in whose interest they were assembled 
and how he had aided in the downfall of the base 
calumniators, thieves and traitors, as he was 
pleased to denominate his former friends and co- 
workers, — because they had failed. 

Ingalls threw his set speech to the winds and 
became the incarnation of burning, corroding, 
blistering sarcasm and scathing denunciation. 
The scimitar of his wrath glittered and flashed 
and his foes fell — many never to rise again po- 
litically in Kansas. Only the manuscript speech 
survives. It bears no more resemblance to the 
one delivered than does the baleful light of a 
tallow candle to the lightning-flash that illumines 
the midnight heavens. But the best that can be 
done is to set it out here : 

There are probably one million people in Kan- 
147 



POLITICS 

sas. I should be unjust to the bravest, noblest 
and most intelligent constituency that ever 
honored a public servant with their confidence, 
if I did not avail myself of the earliest oppor- 
tunity afforded me to declare, with emphasis, my 
belief that there cannot be found one hundred 
reputable citizens of the state, black or white, 
Democrats or Republicans, male or female, who 
have credited the accusations, or certainly sym- 
pathized with the nefarious proceedings against 
me. Those who have prosecuted the charges and 
contributed the thousands of dollars required to 
carry on the conspiracy are less than a score. I 
know them all from the poor catspaws, Eggers 
and Stumbaugh, down through Martin, Cross, 
Leland and Martindale, to Ilorton, Guthrie, Pom- 
eroy and Clarke. 

The majority of those who opposed my elec- 
tion acquiesced in the result. Many who were 
borne along by the cyclone of malice, hatred and 
perfidy that raged against me, regretted their 
action, and would have recalled it if possible. 
The courage, the conscience, the convictions of 
the people irrespective of the party, were with 
me from the outset. The Republican press had 
always been largely in favor of my return to the 
Senate, and the more reputable organs of the 
Democracy preferred me to any of my rivals. 
Arrayed against me from the beginning have been 

148 



POLITICS 

the degraded elements in our politics, the debris, 
the outcasts, the machine men, the implacables ; 
reinforced by two pretended newspapers in Mis- 
souri ; one edited in his brief and casual intervals 
of sobriety by a drunken political tramp from 
Kansas ; the other by a long-haired hermaphrodite, 
who has as much idea of decent journalism as the 
scarlet woman of Babylon would have of the im- 
maculate conception. 

These are the creatures that have revolted at 
the immoralities of my campaign ; the insects 
that have buzzed, and bit and stung. They are 
the vermin of politics; like the noxious parasites 
that prey on the human frame. I have seen it 
intimated in some quarters that I had returned to 
Kansas on a mission of vengeance and retribution. 
Sensible men never get angry with flies and mos- 
quitoes. The only emotions that animate me are 
those which inspire the affectionate mother, who, 
having found in the tresses of her offspring the 
pediculus. humanus, cracks it on her thumb-nail, 
or the prudent husbandman who sifts Paris green 
on the Colorado beetles and squash bugs that in- 
fest his vines, or the vigilant housewife who pur- 
sues that enemy of repose, the cimex lectularius, 
into the crevices of the couch with corrosive sub- 
limate and a feather ! 

The character of a cause may be judged and 
measured by the character of its advocates. To 

149 



POLITICS 

conduct this moral movement these apostles of 
purity selected W. C. Webb, who resigned his 
seat in the Wisconsin Legislature to escape ex- 
pulsion for forgery and peculation; S. A. Riggs, 
who left the office of U. S. District Attorney under 
charges of fraud and incapacity ; and F. S. Stum- 
baugh, a recent resident of Chambersburg, Pa., 
whose character for truth and veracity was suc- 
cessfully impeached in September last in a law- 
suit in that city, many of his neighbors swearing 
that they would not believe him under oath, in a 
community where he had resided for thirty years. 
Had the bar of the state been polled, three men 
more highly qualified by nature and education for 
the filthy task could not have been discovered. 
Their stupidity, ill temper, ignorance and in- 
competence were monumental. Their capacity for 
blundering was superhuman. For their dull mis- 
management, for the discredit they brought upon 
themselves and their cause by the want of 
courtesy and of the knowledge of the time and 
place, I owe them a debt of gratitude which it 
gives me sincere pleasure in this public manner 
to acknowledge. 

The title by which I hold my seat in the Sen- 
ate of the United States has been five times vin- 
dicated. In the last popular election, the only 
question before the people was who should be my 
successor. It was discussed in the newspapers, on 

150 



POLITICS 

the stump, in the school-houses, at the cross-roads, 
by every fireside in Kansas. There is not a can- 
did man in the state who does not know that 
three-fourths of the Republican members elected 
to that Legislature were originally favorable to 
my return. Long before the final ballot, I had 
received a majority of the votes of the Republi- 
cans in both houses of the Legislature, and under 
the common law of politics was thus entitled to 
the unanimous support of my party. Seeing that 
my election was inevitable unless my forces could 
be broken, my adversaries, who had been for years 
attempting to saturate the public mind with the 
most infamous and odious calumnies, suddenly let 
loose a tempest of furious defamation, under cover 
of which, by threats, promises, and purchases, they 
formed the most formidable coalition ever known 
in Kansas politics. No such adulterous alliance 
was ever made before. Ex-Senators and members 
of Congress, Marshals and ex-Marshals, the Chair- 
man of the Central Committee, the Speaker of the 
House, veterans and raw recruits, disappointed 
aspirants for office, inveterate enemies of twenty- 
one years' standing, Republicans, Democrats and 
Greenbackers, all assembled under the leadership 
of the venerable and saintly Pomeroy in one heroic 
struggle of devoted self-abnegation to redeem and 
regenerate the state. 

They selected as their facile instrument the 

151 



POLITICS 

Chief Justice of the State, a man who began his 
political career by writing editorials in favor se- 
cession and drinking toasts to the health of Jef- 
ferson Davis. Persuaded to become a Republican 
by the promise of preferment, he has been con- 
tinuously in office with an accidental hiatus of one 
year from 1860 to 1880. During this long period 
he has habitually trafficked in justice, defrauded 
his clients, basely plundered his partner, and in- 
sulted society by his degraded and flagrant im- 
morality. He has never made a promise he did 
not break nor had a friend whom he was not will- 
ing to betray. 

In this political judge these frenzied conspir- 
ators found a willing accomplice. 

Feebly protesting that he was not a candidate, 
though every one knew that for five years he had 
trodden every devious path that led toward the 
Capitol, that he took his seat on the bench merely 
as a steppingstone to the Senate, he descended 
into the mire of personal politics, accepting the 
nomination in a calumnious speech, and then at- 
tempted to secure success by the open purchase 
of votes. Much has been said about the purity of 
the ermine. That traditional fur was never 
dragged through a fouler puddle. The very seat 
on the bench that was to be vacated was promised 
to two anxious aspirants, and the entire political 
wardrobe of the state was divided in anticipation 

152 



POLITICS 

of my defeat, like the apparel of Joseph among 
his brethren. My election was the triumph of 
decency over disorder. It was a victory of the 
people over the machine politicians. It was 
achieved against tremendous odds and in the face 
of obstacles almost insurmountable. It ought to 
have ended there, but the discomfiture of the op- 
position was too complete, and their baffled rage 
found vent in an investigation before a Committee 
of the Legislature, which was packed by a per- 
jured Speaker, for the purpose of convicting me. 

This so-called investigation was a flagrant bur- 
lesque of justice, a prodigy of partizan unfairness. 
The hostile tribunal, organized to find me guilty, 
sat for weeks with closed doors, without attorneys 
or spectators, no witness knowing what had been 
testified, without notice to those whose rights and 
reputations were thus brutally assailed, and finally 
exonerated me in a majority report which was 
adopted by the Legislature. The Chairman of the 
Committee, a weak but not wicked man, who has 
been rewarded for his violation of his promise to 
vote for me by the office of Reporter of the Su- 
preme Court, revolted at the injustice that he had 
been selected to do. 

Thus, having been endorsed by the people, 
elected by the Legislature, and vindicated by the 
Committee, I had reasonable ground to anticipate 
immunity from annoyance. 

153 



POLITICS 

Had the United States Senate been Republican, 
no further effort against me would have been 
made. But the Senate was Democratic, and as I 
was a John Brown, bloody shirt, stalwart, anti- 
administration Republican, these shallow Me- 
morialists reasoned that the Democrats would 
eagerly snatch at any opportunity to destroy me. 
Extracts from my speeches at Osawatomie and 
elsewhere were reprinted and sent to Democratic 
Senators, and Eggers and Stumbaugh, like a 
couple of Scarabaei trundled their feculent orb 
of ordure, with its egg of malice, along the dusty 
highways to "Washington. 

I have on occasion hitherto criticised the De- 
mocracy with candor. I shall do so without re- 
serve hereafter. But I shall never forget that 
they dealt fairly with me ; and that they refused 
to become allies of my enemies ; that they were in- 
capable of personal injustice for the sake of real 
or fancied political advantage. 

When the evidence taken by the Legislative 
Committee, with the Memorial asking for further 
investigation, was laid before the Senate and 
referred to the Committee on Privileges and Elec- 
tions they refused to entertain it, holding that the 
decision of the Legislature was satisfactory, in the 
absence of additional allegations. 

"Whereupon was filed a supplemental Memorial 
alleging that ten members of the Legislature, 

154 



POLITICS 

naming them, had been induced to vote for me 
by corrupt payments of money or promises of 
office. The investigation was then ordered, and a 
sub-Committee of five assembled at Topeka in 
September and sat three weeks, taking several 
hundred pages of printed testimony. 

When the sub-Committee convened, the Mem- 
orialists promptly withdrew the charges against 
seven of the gentlemen named in the second 
Memorial, and offered nothing but vulgar gossip 
and rumor about the other three. This supple- 
mental Memorial was a deliberate fraud and im- 
position on the Senate, entirely without evidence 
to support it, known to be false by the parties 
who signed it, fabricated for the sole purpose of 
procuring an investigation that would not other- 
wise have been ordered. It was a foul and cruel 
calumny against ten eminent citizens of high 
character, and the creatures who made it, by the 
subsequent withdrawal of its statements, stand 
before the world as self-convicted libelers, slan- 
derers and liars. 

During the pendency of these proceedings I 
have invited the widest and minutest scrutiny. No 
objections to evidence have been interposed, how- 
ever frivolous and incompetent and irrelevant it 
might be. I visited New York and personally im- 
portuned the President of the Telegraph Company 
to produce all messages without hesitation or 

155 

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POLITICS 

delay. The books and vaults of the banks have 
been opened for inspection, and private corres- 
pondence has been freely disclosed. 

Conscious of rectitude, and confiding in the 
justice of the lofty tribunal before which I was 
arraigned, I stood silent amid calumnious clamors. 
Preferring that the decision should not be biased 
by personal considerations, I made no statement 
and gave no testimony before the Committee in 
refutation of the idle inuendoes that were digni- 
fied by the name of evidence. I attended strictly 
to my public duties, asking no quarter, ready to 
meet every accusation, exhibiting no hesitation, 
concealing nothing, shielding myself behind no 
technicalities nor presumptions. 

The conduct of the prosecution was inconceiv- 
ably brutal and cowardly. Not content with the 
opportunity afforded them to defeat me before the 
people in the canvass of 1878, before the Legis- 
lature that elected me, before the Investigating 
Committee of the House at Topeka, before the 
Committee on Privileges and Elections, and before 
the Senate, they habitually resorted to the indus- 
trious circulation of newspaper calumnies, the in- 
vention of slanders and lies, to prejudice my char- 
acter and standing before the Committee and the 
Senate. One of the counsel for the Memorialists 
prepared and published a pamphlet, purporting to 
be a statement of the evidence in the "Ingalls 

156 



POLITICS 

Case" taken before the sub-Committee at Topeka, 
which was forwarded, while the case was still 
pending and undecided, to every member of the 
Committee and to each Senator and Representa- 
tive in Congress, the President and each Cabinet 
Officer, and to all the leading newspapers of the 
country ! Comment is unnecessary. A lawyer who 
in the trial of a hog case before a country justice, 
would resort to such attempts to influence the 
magistrate or the jury, would justly be regarded 
as having poor judgment, a bad case, and a char- 
acter worse than either. 

And since the proceedings have ended, the Hon- 
orable Member of Congress from this District has 
been sending bushels of the scurrilous "brief" 
of the Memorialists to Kansas under his frank, in 
direct violation of the laws of Congress, and de- 
frauding the revenues of the Postoffice Depart- 
ment of two cents upon each copy. They are not 
public documents, they are not published by au- 
thority of Congress. They were printed at the 
expense of the Memorialists. 

Like all apostates who abandon religion for pol- 
itics, this eminent Representative is another illus- 
tration of the fact that because a man is a poor 
preacher he is not necessarily a great statesman. 
Garbage must be removed, but it is not often that 
a man can be found to act as scavenger. I com- 
mend to the reverend gentleman the contempla- 

157 



POLITICS 

tion of the text that will be found in the 22d 
verse of the Second Chapter of the Second Epistle 
general of Peter. [But it is happened unto them 
according to the true proverb, The dog is turned 
to his own vomit again; and the sow that was 
washed to her wallowing in the mire.] 

But at last after many weary months, after 
my conduct had been scrutinized with the tele- 
scope and the microscope, the investigation that 
had been so eagerly coveted came to its close. 
It was another illustration of the "Knavish engi- 
neer hoist by his own petard". It was like the 
gun of Hudibras which 

"Aimed at duck or plover, 
Recoils and kicks its owner over". 

It was a weapon that hit everybody but the man 
it was fired at; a boomerang that returned and 
slew the hurler. 

All the principal candidates against me felt 
called upon to offer themselves as witnesses to 
explain their behavior and clear themselves of 
criminal complicity and bribery and overthrow. 
After hearing all the evidence the Committee 
unanimously decided without a dissenting opinion 
that the charges and allegations against me were 
not sustained, and they were discharged from 
further consideration of the subject. . . . 

The magnificent demonstration of this day has 
been wholly unexpected to me, and on that ac- 

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POLITICS 

count, perhaps, the more gratifying, especially as 
I am led to believe that it emanates spontane- 
ously, without respect to party, from the people 
of Kansas, as a manifestation of the approbation 
and good will of this grand Commonwealth for 
which I have so long labored and where so many 
years of my life have been spent. It would be 
hollow affectation were I to deny that I have 
been profoundly moved by what I have seen and 
heard to-day; by the great multitudes that have 
thronged the streets ; by the enthusiasm ; the tri- 
umphant music; the transitory splendor of rock- 
ets and torches; the acclamation that has rent 
the sky. 

I am not unconscious that this pageant means 
vastly more than a mere personal tribute to me. 
It comes from the Anglo-Saxon instinct of justice 
and fair play. It is a protest against brutal, 
cowardly and malignant detraction. It is a re- 
buke to a most perfidious and detestable plot con- 
ceived by a wretched cabal of implacable enemies, 
who having failed to defeat, conspired to destroy, 
and who were willing in order to accomplish their 
sinister designs to degrade their party and defile 
and dishonor their state. I have endured much, 
but life is full of compensations, and the occur- 
rences of this day convince me that I can confi- 
dently accept the verdict of the people for my 
final and triumphant vindication. 

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POLITICS 
IV. 

The uncomplimentary reference to the inves- 
tigation of his election by Senator Voorhees 
brought upon him the full measure of the wrath 
of Ingalls. The Hoosier was vanquished at every 
point and was led out of the Senate Chamber 
like a whipped lion wounded in every muscle. 
And politically he never recovered. The press 
account of the affair was as follows : 

Senator Voorhees, of Indiana, was not in his 
seat to-day. It was reported that he was confined 
to his room by an attack of rheumatism. 

Mr. Ingalls, however, was in the Vice-presi- 
dent's chair bright and early, and throughout the 
entire session he presided over the deliberations 
of the Senate with his usual gravity and grace. 
The Ingalls-Voorhees encounter of yesterday in 
the Senate was the sensation of the hour to-day. 
It was discussed by statesmen and pseudo-states- 
men in the halls and corridors of the Capitol and 
by the great public in the streets and in the 
lobbies of the hotels. Democrats and Republicans 
universally agreed that the Indiana Senator had 
been badly worsted; in fact that Mr. Ingalls had 
literally mopped up the earth with Mr. Voorhees. 

Eugene F. Ware, the Paint Creek poet, of Fort 
Scott, Kansas, expressed it in the following verse 

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POLITICS 

which he telegraphed to Senator Ingalls this 
morning : 

Cyclone dense, 
Lurid air; 
Wabash hair, 
Hide on fence. 

The shrewdness of Mr. Ingalls' plan of attack 
is universally complimented. His speech, which 
began at two o'clock and closed at four, was bril- 
liant, able and pointed, but it was mild as com- 
pared with the second edition. His grape and 
cannister was in reserve, and Mr. Voorhees didn't 
expect it. The Kansas orator had carefully pre- 
pared himself with the documentary evidence 
against the Tall Sycamore of the Wabash, and 
he was thrice armed with the language necessary 
to rhetorically skin him alive. When at four 
o'clock Mr. Ingalls had concluded his set speech, 
Mr. Voorhees blandly supposed that the ammu- 
nition was all gone and that he would proceed to 
thrash his unarmed adversary. He entered upon 
his excoriation of Mr. Ingalls in apparent glee. 
He felt that it would be an easy task to demoral- 
ize the Kansas Senator and put him utterly to 
rout. He became sarcastic and then tried to be 
funny. He wept for McClellan and Hancock, and 
his sympathetic nature even went out to the man 
he was about to slay. 

The opportunity which Mr. Ingalls anticipated 

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POLITICS 

came, and he interrupted Mr. Voorhees with a 
question which disturbed his equanimity, then 
annoyed him, then angered him, then enraged 
him. He plunged about in his madness until he 
clumsily fell into the pit Ingalls had warily pre- 
pared for him, and from that moment he was at 
the mercy of the Kansan. Mr. Voorhees lost his 
temper, and Mr. Ingalls' remarkable coolness and 
smiling serenity only exasperated him the more. 
He was defiant at first, and it was only when Mr. 
Ingalls began reading the rebel letter which Voor- 
hees believed until that moment was out of ex- 
istence and forever beyond recall, that Mr. Voor- 
hees cowered. At the first sentence he whitened 
with the startling knowldge that after a quarter 
of a century his sins of treason had found him 
out, and when the letter was finished the Hoosier 
was white and trembling. From that moment 
all he could do was to shout "liar" and "dirty 
dog", and abuse and villify everything and every- 
body concerned. 

It was dramatic to the end, and Mr. Voorhees 
left the Senate chamber more thoroughly whipped 
than ever before in his life. To-day he was con- 
spicuous for his absence, and it is reported that 
he will remain away for some days. Democratic 
Senators say he ought to have kept his mouth 
shut when Ingalls closed his speech at four 
o'clock, but he didn't. They are therefore not 

162 



POLITICS 

very regretful that he got the drubbing he 
courted. 

To-day Senator Ingalls was the recipient of con- 
gratulatory telegrams from every quarter of the 
Union. All of them were complimentary, many 
of them unique. The Governors of no less than a 
dozen Kepublican states sent their congratula- 
tions, and complimentary telegrams came even 
from Indiana. Kansas was evidently overjoyed 
by the victory of her senior Senator, for there 
were telegrams patriotic, enthusiastic, and full of 
all the eloquence the wires could transmit from 
every portion of the Sunflower State. 

It was more a passage at arms than a speech. 
The scene in the Senate and the words of the 
controversy are preserved in the Congressional 
Record, from which the following is quoted : 

Mr. Voorhees. Now, if the Senator from Kan- 
sas can find any adjutant-general's report of the 
State of Kansas where his name ever appeared as 
a warrior, even in the diluted and dilapidated 
form of judge-advocate [laughter], I will let up 
on him. I say here that the American Army has 
but three names of Ingalls in it. Rufus Ingalls, 
and I speak his name with honor, the old Quarter- 
master-General, the old reliable friend of Grant, 
was one Ingalls. There was another Ingalls, who 
commanded a regiment from New York, and when 

163 



POLITICS 

we go out towards Kansas there was another 
Ingalls, by the name of Pearl P. Ingalls, who was 
chaplain of an Iowa regiment. I will ask the 
Senator from Iowa about him. He prayed and 
preached. That is the nearest that the name of 
Ingalls is found in the United States Army in the 
records of the War Department. Being pious, 
perhaps he was a cousin of the Senator, but I do 
not know how that may be. There was none 
other. 

All this, Mr. President, is not much to the 
American people. The Senator from Kansas and 
myself know how little it counts, and all that 
justifies me in bringing it forward is that that 
Senator on such a slender foundation sees fit to 
appear as the censor of George B. McClellan and 
General Hancock. 

I ask him if I am not fair in presenting the 
reasons why somebody else ought to discuss the 
military aspects of this question besides him. He 
may say that somebody ought besides me. I will 
answer, yes, but, sir, I will say that he has no 
greater claims than I; and here, once for all, 
whatever shortcomings I may have had, I will 
stand with him on a popular vote before the 
soldiers of Indiana or the soldiers of Kansas, and 
leave this body if I am not approved by them over 
him. If that is arrogance, it is justified by the 
provocation. 

164 



POLITICS 

The Senator from Kansas has alluded to Gen- 
eral Hancock's celebrated Order No. 40, issued 
while he was at New Orleans, issued in the blaz- 
ing spirit of civil liberty, the supremacy of civil 
government over the military. It spoke the voice 
of the fathers and rang out over the country as 
a bugle-call back to the foundations of the Gov- 
ernment. The Senator saw fit to denounce it. I 
have simply to answer in response that the Su- 
preme Court of the United States, composed of 
men of the Senator's own political persuasion, 
construed that order to be constitutional and 
founded upon the eternal principles of liberty. 

Mr. President, I have occupied the floor as 
long as I designed to do so. I spoke, as I said, 
a week ago for the truth of history, and here in 
my heart I reassert and reaffirm what I then said. 
I am willing that the figures in regard to pen- 
sions be summed up as between those stated by 
the Senator from Kansas and myself. I will not 
open that question and go into detail now. As 
to the history of the South and the history of 
reconstruction, I stated the true scenes through 
which I lived, through which I passed, and which 
I know. I know that the Kepublican party in its 
dominancy and supremacy spoliated the South of 
over $200,000,000, broke in dishonor her civil 
governments, and but for the fact that she is com- 
posed of a people born of self-reliance, born to 

165 



POLITICS 

civilization and the higher arts and walks of life, 
they would have been destroyed from the earth. 

In addition to what I said last week I will say 
here now that the annals of mankind furnish no 
other instance where the system of labor, social 
organization was torn up and turned upside down, 
slaves set free (which I was glad of), where so- 
ciety held together as it did in the South. You 
may attack, you may denounce, you may make 
war on such a people, but the end is their tri- 
umph and your defeat. [Applause in the gal- 
leries.] 

Mr. Ingalls. It is not my purpose, Mr. Presi- 
dent, to prolong the debate. I regret exceedingly 
that the Senator from Indiana has thought best 
to refer to personal matters in connection with 
my history, to which I do not propose now to 
advert. My military service was inconspicuous 
and obscure, and no one is more conscious thaD 
I am of the debt that I owe my country, and of 
the unpaid obligation of gratitude which I am 
under to those who did what I might under other 
circumstances have done. 

But inasmuch as the Senator from Indiana has 
seen fit to invite comparison between his record, 
his history, and his relation and mine to the great 
questions that have for the past twenty-five years 
attracted the attention of the country, I feel it 
to be my duty, in the defense of the truth of 

166 



POLITICS 

history, to put on the record the information in 
my possession, and I have it in shape I think that 
he will not deny. I shall refer only to public 
matters in public records, and I shall venture the 
affirmation that whatever may have been my own 
relation to the great struggle between the North 
and the South, and for constitutional liberty, the 
Senator from Indiana was from the outset the 
determined, outspoken, positive, aggressive, and 
malignant enemy of the Union cause. 

Mr. Voorhees. I pronounce that deliberately 
false. 

Mr. Ingalls. Well — 

Mr. Voorhees. It is absolutely false. I voted 
for every dollar that was paid to the soldier, for 
every suit of clothes he wore, and for every pen- 
sion that he has ever had, and for every land 
warrant. A proper statement — 

Mr. Ingalls. I did not interrupt the Senator 
from Indiana. The Senator from Indiana took 
seven weeks to reply to my speech of March 6. 
He came in here with a pile of manuscript bigger 
than a Hebrew Talmud — sweltering venom sleep- 
ing got. I can excuse unpremeditated assaults. 

There is something in chance medley and hot 
foot that is excusable, but the deliberate, premed- 
itated preparation of malignant, unfounded at- 
tack is to my mind entirely incompatible with a 
noble nature. When the Senator from Indiana 

167 



POLITICS 

sat down in the privacy of his closet and called 
me a Thersites and referred to me as a "judge- 
advocate", peevish and paltry politician, as one 
who, like Job's war-horse, had smelt the battle 
afar off, if he thinks that is not a personal assault, 
or if that is his idea of the observance of the com- 
ity that ought to prevail among gentlemen, well 
and good. 

My relations with the Senator from Indiana 
for many years have been those of cordiality and 
friendship, and never was I more surprised than 
when my attention was called to the vindictive, 
unfounded, malevolent, and unjustifiable asper- 
sion with which he assailed me in manuscript. 1 
could have borne it if an enemy had done it, but 
it was, as the Psalmist said, "my own familiar 
friend". I was unconscious of ever having ut- 
tered a word in derogation of the Senator from 
Indiana. "We have agreed on many questions, 
and in the supreme crisis of my fortunes to which 
he has referred, unjustifiably referred, referred 
to me as having been "whitewashed", I had his 
avowed and express sympathy; and when I es- 
caped from the conspirators who had followed me 
from the State Capitol to the doors of this Senate 
Chamber the Senator from Indiana was the very 
first man to write me a note of congratulation 
and sympathy. 

Yet he comes in here to-day and says : ' ' Thank 

168 



POLITICS 

God, he never had been followed here by a com- 
mittee that questioned his right to his title to his 
seat", and with much diffuseness of illustra- 
tion, for the purpose of casting aspersion and 
belittling and humiliating me in the eyes of the 
American people, when I had only referred to his 
public utterances given in debate, his speeches, 
which he did not deny. 

Mr. Voorhees. I did. 

Mr. Ingalls. The Senator from Indiana did 
not deny the veracity of the publication that I 
read. 

Mr. Yoorhees. I did. 

Mr. Ingalls. He could not do so. It was a 
verbatim stenographic report, and was certified 
to by the man who made it. 

Mr. Voorhees. I do not want to interrupt the 
Senator — 

Mr. Ingalls. Yes ; I shall be very glad to hear 
the Senator, because I would not do him an in- 
justice. 

Mr. Voorhees. I say that not a word or syl- 
lable read by the Senator is true, or believed to 
be true in Indiana. I have met those accusations 
and trampled them under foot. I would say fur- 
ther that the Senator's insinuation that I was 
ever a member of the secret society of the Knights 
of the Golden Circle is so base and infamously 
false that I do not know how to choose language 

169 



POLITICS 

to denounce it. I am not so held in my own 
State. [Applause in the galleries.] 

The Presiding Officer. The Chair will remind 
the persons in the galleries that they are here by 
the courtesy of the Senate and are its guests. 
They have been reminded more than once that 
the rules of the Senate do not allow any manifes- 
tations of satisfaction with or disagreement to 
what is said in the Senate ; and while it would be 
a harsh measure, as has been suggested, and it 
would be much regretted, to clear the galleries, if 
it is necessary for the purpose of enforcing the 
rules of the Senate it will have to be done. 

Mr. Ingalls. The Senator from Indiana has 
just said that he was in favor of the destruction 
of slavery and that he was opposed to secession, 
and yet in the published volume of his own 
speeches there is a reprint of an address delivered 
by him in Virginia shortly before the war in 
which he advocates both. 

Mr. Voorhees. Now, will the Senator pardon 
me a moment? 

Mr. Ingalls. Certainly. 

Mr. Voorhees. I will be perfectly candid. I 
did not say that I was in favor of the destruction 
of slavery in connection with the war, but I did 
say I was glad that it took place. Now, make 
the most of that. 

Mr. Ingalls. I will say further than that, that 

170 



POLITICS 

the Senator from Indiana at the time when he de- 
livered that speech had two editions of it pre- 
pared, one of them for circulation in the North 
and one in the South. 

Mr. Voorhees. That is not true. 

Mr. Ingalls. Not true ! Why, they are ac- 
cessible to-day, just as much so — 

Mr. Voorhees. Get them and show them. 

Mr. Ingalls. They are just as accessible as 
the Statutes of the United States. 

Mr. Voorhees. Get them and show them. I 
say it is not true. I have met that on the stump. 
I have heard campaign falsifiers before. 

Mr. Ingalls. The Senator pleases to call these 
campaign rumors because he has heard them for 
the last fifteen years, and therefore they are not 
true. 

In 1860, after the Senators from South Carolina 
had withdrawn from this Chamber, and when 
preparations for war were rife all over the South, 
and everybody knew that secession was to be, so 
far as the South could make it, an accomplished 
fact, the Senator from Indiana wrote a letter, 
which I shall read. Perhaps he will deny that. 
It is a letter to Mr. Francis A. Shoup, that he 
took South with him and filed in the Confederate 
war department in support of his own application 
for appointment as a brigadier-general in the 
Confederate army. The man who received it was 

171 

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'N 



POLITICS 

appointed a brigadier-general in the Confederate 
army, and he is now an ecclesiastic in Alabama 
or somewhere in one of the Southern States. I 
will read what the Senator from Indiana wrote. 
Anybody can see it, and anybody who knows his 
handwriting can identify it. This is the letter: 

Indianapolis, Ind., December 12, 1860. 

My friend, Capt. Francis A. Shoup, is about visiting the 
South with his sister, on account of her health. 

I have know Captain Shoup since our boyhood; we were 
schoolmates. He is a graduate of West Point, and was 
in the Army as a lieutenant four years. No more honor- 
able or upright gentleman exists. On the disturbing ques- 
tions of the day his sentiments are entirely with the 
South, and one of his objects is a probable home in that 
section. 

I take this occasion to say that his sentiments and my 
own are in close harmony, 

D. W. Voorhees. 

I suppose the Senator will say that that is a 
campaign slander, the vile calumny of the oppo- 
sition press. 

Mr. Voorhees. Mr. President, that is not a 
campaign slander, but it is — 

Mr. Ingalls. He has trodden it under foot and 
spat on it. 

Mr. Voorhees. "Will the Senator pardon me a 
moment ? 

Mr. Ingalls. Certainly. 

Mr. Voorhees. I say it is not a campaign 

172 



POLITICS 

slander, but it is one of those things the people 
of Indiana have passed on for now nearly thirty 
years. 

Mr. Ingalls. The Democratic party of Indi- 
ana have passed upon it, I dare say. [Laughter.] 

Mr. Voorhees. They have passed upon it by 
a very large majority and no — 

Mr. Ingalls. Oh, I know the Knights of the 
Golden Circle have passed upon it. 

Mr. Voorhees. No colporteur or missionary 
from Kansas can give it any more respectability 
than the fellows in Indiana have heretofore. I 
have disposed of them. There was no war when 
the letter was written; there was not for nearly 
a year afterwards. 

Mr. Ingalls. Sumter fell ninety days after- 
wards. 

Mr. Voorhees. No, it did not. 

Mr. Ingalls. Let me look at the date. 

Mr. Voorhees. In December. 

Mr. Ingalls. December 12, 1860. When did 
Sumter fall? 

Mr. Voorhees. In April. 

Mr. Ingalls. In April, 1861? 

Mr. Voorhees. Yes. 

Mr. Ingalls. December, January, February, 
March — four months afterwards. 

Mr. Voorhees. Yes ; inaccuracy is written on 
your face. 

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POLITICS 

Mr. Ingalls. "Within four months from the 
time the letter was written Sumter had fallen, 
and yet the Senator from Indiana says : 

I take this occasion to say that his sentiments and my 
own are in close harmony. 

That is something I suppose that the Senator 
regards as the vile expectorations of a partisan 
press. He spits on it and treads it underfoot 
and kicks it out of sight. I will say to the Sena- 
tor from Indiana that that paper was very im- 
portant and influential in securing Mr. Shoup 
the appointment of brigadier-general in the Con- 
federate army. When the archives of that gov- 
ernment were captured it was sent here to the 
"War Department, and the original is on file 
to-day. 

Jesse D. Bright, from Indiana, was expelled for 
as small an offense as that from this body, yet the 
Senator from Indiana ventures to criticise my 
military record and my right to speak of the 
relations of George B. McClellan and Hancock 
to the Democratic party. The Senator from Indi- 
ana says that the accusation that he called Union 
soldiers hirelings and Lincoln dogs, that he said 
they ought to go to the nearest blacksmith shop 
and have a collar welded around their necks on 
which should be inscribed, "My dog. A. Lin- 
coln", is a campaign calumny and slander which 

174 



POLITICS 

has been spat on and kicked out and trodden 
under foot. I will say to the Senator from Indi- 
ana that the averment that he made that state- 
ment can be substantiated by as credible a witness 
as there is in this city at this time. 

Mr. Voorhees. It is false, and even if the 
Senator said it it would be utterly false — just 
as false coming from the Senator as from the 
greatest liar ever in the country. 

Mr. Ingalls. If this were a police court the 
Senator from Indiana would be sent to the rock- 
pile for being drunk and disorderly. 

Sullivan, Ind., September 28, 1868. 

We, the undersigned citizens of Sullivan County, Indi- 
ana, were present at a public speaking held in Sullivan 
August 5, 1862, when Hon. D. W. Voorhees, said, speaking 
in reference to the Union soldiers, that they should go 
to the nearest blacksmith shop and have an iron collar 
made and placed around their necks, inscribed thereon in 
large letters, "My dog. A. Lincoln", and at the same 
time he referred to the Union soldiers as Lincoln's dogs 
and hirelings. 

Valentine Hick. Richard Dodd. 
James J. Laudermilk. Jacob B. Miller. 

Warden Williams. Isaac Hilderbrand. 

Lafayette Hartley. Margaret Hereford. 

Philip W. Beck. Mary Hereford. 

Helen Hereford. Nelson Burton. 

Mrs. M. E. Earl. Seth Cushman. 

Thomas Bulton. Owen Adams. 

John W. Hawkins. J. H. Ridgeway. 

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POLITICS 

I suppose those are reputable citizens of Indi- 
ana. They are not ashamed of their names or 
their residence. They give their home and their 
designation. The Senator from Indiana can settle 
the question of the truth or falsehood with them 
and not with me. And when the Senator from 
Indiana states that he has been endorsed by his 
own party, that all these accusations have been 
trod on and contumeliously spat upon by the 
people of Indiana, I say to him that that has only 
been done by the Democratic party of Indiana. 
We all know what business the Democratic party 
of Indiana were engaged in during the war. 
Seventy thousand of them were Knights of the 
Golden Circle, conspiring against this Union. 
They entered into combinations, as General Holt 
states in his report on that subject, for the pur- 
pose of — 

1. Aiding soldiers to desert, and harboring and pro- 
tecting deserters. 

2. Discouraging enlistment and resisting the draft. 

3. Circulation of disloyal and treasonable publications. 

4. Communication with, and giving intelligence to, the 
enemy. 

5. Aiding the enemy by recruiting for them, or assist- 
ing them to recruit within our lines. 

6. Furnishing the rebels with arms, ammunition, etc. 

7. Co-operating with the enemy in raids and invasions. 

8. Destruction of Government property. 

9. Destruction of private property and persecution of 
loyal men. 

10. Assassination and murder. 

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POLITICS 

And it is susceptible of proof that they did 
conspire to murder Governor Morton, to overturn 
the State government and put it in the possession 
of the rebels; and this organization, to which 
the Senator from Indiana says he never belonged, 
had a ritual and organization of which 112 copies 
were found in his office — in the office of the 
Senator from Indiana — at the time when Han- 
cock was at the bloody angle. In that same 
office was found correspondence between the Sen- 
ator from Indiana and a Senator from New Jersey 
for the purpose of furnishing arms, 20,000 stand 
of them, not to the National Government, for the 
Senator from Indiana was not in sympathy with 
that at that time; not to the State government 
of Indiana, because that was in other and loyal 
hands; but for the purpose, as may be imagined, 
of carrying out the objects and purposes of this 
organization. 

I am aware that the Senator from Indiana 
states and has stated that although these papers 
were found in his office, it was not then occupied 
by him. He is entitled to the benefit of the 
doubt. He states that he had abandoned the 
practice of law and was not intending to resume 
it; but I have here a list of what was found in 
his office at the same time when these 112 copies 
of the ritual and rules of organization of the 
Knights of the Golden Circle were found there, 

177 



POLITICS 

and he never denied it. He afterwards said that 
there had been an unwarrantable search of his 
private papers. General Carrington is a well- 
known man, and has stated publicly what was 
found in the office of the Senator from Indiana 
that did belong to him at the time when "these 
papers" were found. 

The papers referred to are 112 copies of the 
ritual of the 0. A. K., a treasonable order, aiming 
to overturn the Government of the United States, 
of whose Congress you are a member. 

Your law library and office furniture were in 
the office where "these papers" were found. 

You had declined renomination for Congress 
and the office was not for rent as late as April, 
1864. 

The ritual had been issued in the autumn of 
1863. Your Congressional documents were in the 
office where "these papers" were found. 

Your speeches, up to March, of your entire 
Congressional career, with the "John Brown" 
speech, were in the office where "these papers" 
were found. The correspondence of Senator 
Wall, of New Jersey, under his frank, indorsing 
a proposition to furnish you with 20,000 stand 
of Garibaldi rifles, just imported, "for which he 
could vouch", was in the office where "these 
papers" were found. 

The correspondence of C. L. Vallandigham, 

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POLITICS 

from Windsor, Canada West, assuring you "our 
people will fight", and that "he is ready", and 
fixing a point on the "Lima road" at "which 
to meet you", was in the office where "these 
papers" were found. 

There is a little more historical information on 
that subject which I think may be valuable. In 
the rebel archives was found a letter from Mr. 
Clement C. Clay, dated Welland Hotel, St. Cath- 
erine's, July 11, 1864, addressed to Hon. Jacob 
Thompson, Montreal. Lest I may seem inaccurate 
1 believe I will have the whole letter printed. I 
take an extract from it. It is full of confidential 
communications to Mr. Thompson as an agent of 
the rebel Confederacy, tells him what is being 
done by the Sons of Liberty and the Knights 
of the Golden Circle, advises methods for the pur- 
pose of releasing Confederate prisoners, and he 
says: 

The only fear is, they will not be prepared for it, and 
will be surprised and stupefied without notice. You need 
not fear, as they are of the sworn brotherhood. Voorhees 
is to be here on Monday or Tuesday, and perhaps Ben Wood. 

July 11, 1864, "Voorhees is to be here on Mon- 
day or Tuesday, and perhaps Ben Wood". What 
was Voorhees "to be here" for in Canada to see 
C. C. Clay, and why was Jacob Thompson, of the 
Southern Confederacy, advised of it? 

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POLITICS 

The correspondence of Joseph Ristine, auditor 
of state, declaring that "he would like to see all 
Democrats unite in a bold and open resistance to 
all attempts to keep ours a united people by 
force of steel"; and that "this was a war against 
Democracy, and our only hope was a successful 
resistance of the South", was in the office "where 
these papers" were found. 

The correspondence of E. C. Hibben, who as- 
sures you that "the Democracy are fast stiffening 
up when this war is to be openly declared as 
being waged for the purpose of freeing the 
negro", "which will arouse another section of 
the country to arms", and declaring "that Lin- 
coln bayonets are shouldered for cold-blooded 
murder", was in the office "where these papers" 
were found. 

The correspondence of J. Hardesty, who "wants 
you to have that one hundred thousand men 
ready, as we do not know how soon we may 
need them", was in the office where "this Ritual" 
was found. 

And I have the letter of Hardesty here in which 
he calls on the Senator from Indiana to have 
the one hundred thousand men in readiness. 
There is a curious explanation about that letter, 
which is that when the Senator from Indiana, just 
previous to the breaking out of the war, was in 

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POLITICS 

Virginia making addresses in favor of slavery 
and secession, he made a speech at a serenade or 
on a public occasion in which he said that if any 
attempt was made to coerce the South one hun- 
dred thousand Democrats in Indiana would come 
down to resist the effort. My informant says 
that they did come, but their guns were pointed 
the wrong way. 

The correspondence of J. J. Bingham, who asks 
you "if you think the South has resources enough 
to keep the Union forces at bay", and says that 
"you must have sources of information which he 
has not" was in the office where "these papers" 
were found. 

The correspondence of John G. Davis informing 
you that a certain New York Journal ' ' is wonder- 
fully exercised about the secret anti-war move- 
ments" and "tremble in their boots in view of 
the terrible reaction which is sure to await them" 
was in the office where "these papers" were 
found. 

The correspondence of U. S. "Walker, who 
"keeps out of the way", because they are trying 
to arrest him for officiating in secret societies, in- 
closing the oath of the K. G. C's prior to that of 
the 0. A. K, was in the office where "these 
papers" were found. 

The petition of C. L. Vallandigham, D. W. 

181 



POLITICS 

Voorhees, and Benjamin Wood in favor of two 
republics and a United South was in the office 
where "these papers" were found. 

The correspondence of Campbell, E. Etheridge, 
George H. Pendleton, J. E. McDonald, W. B. 
Hanna, and others, Mr. Carrington says, are some 
of the "circumstances" that led me to believe 
that "these papers" the ritual of the 0. A. K., 
were found in your office. 

I looked upon these circumstances as a plain 
juror might be supposed to do, and not as a 
statesman, and innocently supposed that such 
papers as these, if spared from the fire, would 
be in possession of the owner, and that the office 
of the owner would be the place where "these 
papers" would be found. 

And yet, with Colonel Thompson, I cheerfully 
accepted your denial, and so respond as you re- 
quest "that the people may know the truth". 

The Senator from Indiana in response to this 
wrote a letter three columns long that was pub- 
lished in the Democratic papers and printed in 
the Richmond Enquirer in Virginia, with praise 
of the Senator from Indiana. 

A letter from J. Hardesty, of Harrisonburgh, 
Va., to his nephew, Daniel W. Voorhees, dated — 

182 



Addressed 



POLITICS 

Harrisonburgh, December 17, 1862. 



My Dear Nephew: We want you to hold that 100,000 
men in readiness, as we do not know how soon we may 
want them. 

J. Hardesty. 

Addressed on envelope: 

Hon. Daniel W. Voorhees, 

Terre Haute, Ind. 

Senator Wall, of New Jersey, to Dan Voorhees. 
Long Branch, August 21, 1863. 

My Dear Sir: I inclose you two letters from a man by 

the name of Carr, in reference to arms. A letter directed 

to him simply Philadelphia will reach him. I can vouch 

for the excellent quality and great efficiency of the rifles. 

Yours in haste, 

James W. Wall. 

And another from Carr to Wall, dated August 
14, 1863, on the same subject, giving the price 
at which these arms could be purchased, which 
was $14 apiece, saying there were about twenty 
thousand of them in all. For what purpose they 
were wanted is left to the imagination to disclose. 

With regard to the question as to the side on 
which the sympathies of the Senator from Indiana 
were — I suppose the Senator from Indiana will 
deny this also and say it was mere campaign 
calumny cast out and trodden under the feet of 
men — on the 5th day of March, 1864, he spoke 

183 



POLITICS 

of Vallandigham as ''that representative Ameri- 
can patriot, who, with Hendricks and Seymour 
and Richardson, had done so much to uphold the 
hands of the American public and had preserved 
so far the guaranties of constitutional liberty", 
a man who was tried and banished from the 
country for being a traitor, and justly banished; 
and yet the Senator from Indiana said on the 5th 
of March, 1864 : 

Will some poor, crawling, despised sycophant and tool 
of executive despotism — 

That sounds very much like the Senator from 
Indiana. If that is a fabrication it is a very 
ingenious one — 

Will some poor, crawling, despised sycophant and tool 
of executive despotism dare to say that I shall not pro- 
nounce the name of Vallandigham? The scandal and stigma 
of his condemnation — 

The scandal and stigma of Vallandigham 's con- 
demnation — 

and banishment have filled the civilized world, and the 
Lethean and oblivious wave of a thousand years can not 
wash away the shame and reproach of that miserable 
scene from the American name. Some members have at- 
tacked with fierce clamor the great American statesman 
and Christian gentleman who suffers his exile in the 
cause of liberty on a foreign soil. So the basest cur 
that ever kenneled may bay, at "the bidding of a master, 
the aged lion in the distance". 

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POLITICS 

His opinion of Mr. Lincoln was contained in 
the same speech — 

Genghis Kahn and Tamerlane, preserved by the pen of 
the historian for universal execration, found no pursuit 
so pleasant as calling for more men for the harvest of 
death, and, like our present Executive, snuffing with 
jests and ribaldry the warm taint of blood on every gale. 

Oh, bitter mockery, justice has been dethroned and the 
blessings of liberty annihilated. 

Because four millions of slaves were set free, 
apparently. 

There is not one square mile of free soil in the Ameri- 
can Republic. 

The Senator from Indiana was also a member of 
Congress in the early days of the war, and he 
made some speeches upon the subjects that were 
then agitating the country. In an address to his 
constituents in April, 1861, — I hope I am not 
inaccurate about that — he declared that he 
would never vote a single dollar or a single man 
for the prosecution of the war, and he never 
did so long as he was in Congress. 

He constantly and persistently voted against 
every measure for upholding the Union cause and 
re-inforcing its armies, voted against all the con- 
stitutional amendments, and finally declared by a 
nay vote that he would not hold that the amend- 
ments were constitutional or binding upon the 
conscience of the American people. And yet the 

185 



POLITICS 

Senator from Indiana, who I think deserves char- 
ity more than any man that I know upon this 
floor, and who has received it at the hands of 
his associates, and who can less afford than any 
man of my acquaintance to invite a scrutiny of 
his war record with anybody, with playfulness 
and hilariousness refers to the fact that I served 
during the war as a judge-advocate with the rank 
of major and subsequently of lieutenant-colonel. 
I have this to say: That however obscure or in- 
efficient my services may have been, they were 
always on the side of my country, and not as 
his has been, always against it. 

Mr. Voorhees. Mr. President, if the Senator 
from Kansas, to just take a matter of fact, will 
find one single vote that I have cast against the 
payment of soldiers for their pay, for their sup- 
plies, for their bounties, or appropriations for 
their pensions, I will resign my seat in the Sen- 
ate. Every word that has been stated on that 
subject is absolutely false by the record — abso- 
lutely. 

I measure my words as I stand here. If I am 
an object of his charity, he is an object of my 
contempt. He says I issued a proclamation to my 
constituents in April, 1861, that I would not vote 
for men or money. That is false. I never did 
anything of the kind; never in the world. I was 
a pretty hard fighter during the war in political 

186 



POLITICS 

campaigns. The party then in power gave it out 
that there should be no parties, that we should 
not contend as parties; but I did not accept that, 
and I fought my battles in my own way. I fought 
for free speech and a free press ; but the soldiers 
of Indiana know, and they will measure and hear 
what I am now saying, that I voted for every 
dollar that ever fed them, that ever clothed them, 
and the man who says otherwise is a falsifier 
and a slander, and I brand it on him. 

I can go home to my people on that statement. 
In 1864 I was in a bitter, hard canvass for Con- 
gress. The Senator from Kansas has announced 
that I had quit practicing law. That is not true. 
There is not a word of truth in it. I had gone 
from one office to another. Some papers that 
belonged to me were left in the office, and others 
put up a job on me in political campaigns, and 
put things there which were found there and 
were published as found there. I denied then, 
as I deny now, that I was ever a member of any 
secret political society in my life. 

Oliver P. Morton, a brave man, not, like the 
Senator from Kansas, small and active, but great 
and strong, and who believed that there was a 
secret organization in Indiana menacing the 
safety of the Republic, never pretended that I 
was connected with that organization. There 
has never been a man in public life, until the 

187 

-13 



POLITICS 

Senator from Kansas here persuades himself to do 
it, who ever alluded to the pretended fact that 
I belonged to such an organization. There was 
a gentleman from New Hampshire once, a member 
of the House, who inadvertently, in a sort of 
hurried way, alluded in a general manner to me 
as a member of a secret organization in Indiana; 
and the next day I took the floor for a personal 
explanation. 

I remember the House gathered around me, and 
among the rest General Schenck, who was the 
leader of the house on the opposite side. He 
came close to me. I explained all these things, 
and that was the last of them. Now the Senator 
from Kansas sees fit, nosing around in a low, little 
way, to bring up these things which are stale, 
putrid, cast off, and the offal of years gone by. 

When the matter that he speaks of as to my 
office was brought out by General Carrington I 
was in a hard canvass for Congress. I carried the 
district by nearly 800 majority. As my friend, the 
Senator from Massachusetts [Mr. Dawes], remem- 
bers, they contested my seat, and threw me out 
because the Eepublicans needed two-thirds major- 
ity to fight Andrew Johnson then, and for no 
other reason in the world. I went back to a 
changed district, where they put 1,500 majority 
upon me, and I beat them in that district with 
the soldiers all at home. 

188 



POLITICS 

Now, if the Senator from Kansas thinks he is 
making respectability or honor or even courtesy 
by reviving these things which have been passed 
upon by a jury of my peers — a good deal more 
than his peers, but a jury of my peers in Indiana 
— he is mistaken. I have had several elections 
to Congress since all this poor old stuff was pub- 
lished, and then I have been four times commis- 
sioned a Senator. I have been elected three times 
by the Legislature, and I have carried the State 
twice, by from 25,000 to 30,000 majority. If the 
Senator from Kansas in his miserable condition 
attempting to extricate himself from the disgrace 
of assailing McClellan and Hancock, sees fit to 
assail me, he is welcome to do so. A man who 
has aspersed the fame of McClellan, and says that 
he had fought two years trying to make the war 
a failure, and that Hancock was an ally of the 
Confederacy, and that Hancock and McClellan 
and Horace Greeley all belonged to the worst ele- 
ments of the North, I feel his abuse as a compli- 
ment, and I thank him for the aspersions and 
respond to him accordingly. [Laughter and ap- 
plause.] 

So far as the old stuff about my denouncing 
the soldiers of Indiana is concerned, the soldiers 
will take care of that, and there is only a miser- 
able set of people who were never soldiers, or 
if they were were sutlers most likely or sutlers' 

189 



POLITICS 

clerks, ever allude to anything of that kind, and 
I can only say — I do not want to be offensive to 
the Senator from Kansas, and do not much care 
whether I am or not [laughter] — I can only say 
(because he has thrust these matters upon me), 
as I have said, that the people whose names he 
reads there do lie and do not tell the truth, nor 
does the Senator when he repeats what they say 
tell the truth either. I have not the slightest 
concern, not the slightest feeling, not the slightest 
irritation upon this matter. It has been passed 
upon time and again. 

As for the letter for Captain Shoup I wrote 
the letter for Frank Shoup. I knew him well. 
We were boys at school together. He was going 
down South with his sister, who was dying of 
consumption. It was in December, before a single 
state had seceded, before the war had broken out, 
and I did sympathize with the feelings of the 
South that there ought to be a compromise at that 
time. The Crittenden compromise was pending, 
and the Peace Congress was called. I had no 
favors to ask; and as to charity, as I said, I 
respond with contempt. 

That is all I have to say. 

Mr. Eustis. Mr. President — 

Mr. Ingalls. Will the Senator from Indiana 
allow me to ask him whether the soldiers of Indi- 
ana did not threaten to hang him with a bell-rope 

190 



POLITICS 

on a train between New Castle and Terre Haute 
after he made that "Lincoln dog" speech? 
[Laughter.] 

Mr. Voorhees. Mr. President, the Senator is 
a great liar when he intimates such a thing — a 
great liar and a dirty dog. [' ' Order ! " " Order ! "] 
Such a thing never occurred in the world. That 
is all the answer I have to make. 

The Presiding Officer. The Senator is hardly 
in order. Personal discussion is not proper. The 
Chair hopes Senators will be in order. 

Mr. Voorhees. I pass it back to the scoundrel 
behind him who is instigating these lies. 

Mr. Ingalls. Mr. President, there is a very 
reputable gentleman in the Chamber, a citizen of 
Indiana, who informs me that the signers of the 
certificate about the "Lincoln dog" speech are 
entirely reputable inhabitants, male and female, 
of Sullivan County, and that he knows fifty people 
there who heard the speech made and can swear 
to it. 

Mr. Voorhees. I say he is an infamous liar 
and scoundrel who says I did. I say so. 

The Presiding Officer. The Senator will be in 
order. 

At this point the friends of Senator Voorhees 
led him from the Senate Chamber. He was pale 
and trembling. He tried to hold up his head and 

191 



POLITICS 

look defiant — an effort that was a miserable 
failure. Outside the door he burst into tears and 
cursed his fate, saying that his career was run 
and his reputation for patriotism blasted. He was 
in despair. And he was desperate. His friends 
kept him concealed several days. From that day 
he did not have his old bearing in the Senate. 
His demeanor was apologetic and conciliatory. 
In fact, his public career may be said to have 
ended that day. 



Ingalls secured a third term as United States 
Senator without trouble. This term expired at 
a sorry time for the brilliant Senator. That 
grotesque political movement known as populism 
was in full blast. Nothing like it was ever seen 
in America. 

The populist uprising was a political revolution 
that failed. It was begotten of oppression and 
born of an appeal for justice. It was a protest 
against gross and long-continued usurpation of 
the rights of the people by lawless and predatory 
combinations of criminals and freebooters in- 
trenched in all the departments of the govern- 

192 



POLITICS 

ment. It was conceived in righteousness, but born 
to misfortune. Its sansculottic wet-nurses proved 
self-seeking vagabonds with confiscatory procliv- 
ities. Wild-eyed, abnormally bearded, peculiarly 
garbed, they went forth proclaiming preposterous 
remedies for a sick nation. These political street- 
walkers sacrificed the revolution for the spoils of 
office, to obtain which they "fused" with the 
very principles against which their party had 
risen. Many of the reforms sought by the honest 
minority have, happily, been incorporated in state 
and national statutes. The blatant demagogues, 
the criminals, the blackmailers of insurance com- 
panies and other business institutions found to 
be at their mercy, held high carnival over their 
carrion for a season, then slunk back into that 
obscurity from which they had emerged. 

The movement became a contagious psychologi- 
cal disorder. Women loud of mouth and brazen 
of face became political crusaders and paraded 
up and down the land in frenzy and dishabille. 
Tribunes were raised, and from these a succession 
of bewhiskered orators poured a continuous 
stream of monotonous balderdash which was her- 
alded by waiting multitudes of mediocre rustics 

193 



POLITICS 

and devotees as the gospel of human rights and 
political freedom — that is, the New gospel. The 
tail of some crazy comet must have beclouded the 
earth. The rankest demagogue was acclaimed the 
greatest patriot. Indians joined in the frenzy and 
set to ghost-dancing and the practice of incanta- 
tion to restore their lost domains and bring back 
the buffalo — a course far more intelligent and 
reasonable than that of the hypnotic pale-face he 
imitated. Coxey armies marched thousands of 
miles to Washington to protest against fancied 
invasions of man's primitive liberties only to be 
ordered off the grass by truckling English menials 
and lawn-cutters with exaggerated notions of 
their functions. One slatternly jade announced 
that she had been made a Freemason, and in a 
feast at the close of the Red Cross work in a 
lodge in Kansas City, Kansas, the following toast 
was proposed by a waggish member: "Here's to 

Mary Yellin, the Knight of the Red C !" Of 

her Ingalls wrote to Ware "I have never men- 
tioned that female's (?) name, and I suspect this 
silence irritates her perhaps more than speech, 
and then, too, a man is always at great disad- 
vantage in any altercation with any person 

194 



POLITICS 

wearing feminine garb, no matter what the sex 
may be". 

Ingalls saw the rising cloud when it was no 
bigger than a man's hand. His friends also saw 
it and entreated him to lead in a movement to 
confine it to a faction of his party — something 
which might have been accomplished. So far 
did he heed these admonitions as to prepare an 
address to be delivered at some, proper place in 
the April before the election of the Legislature. 
But he was in doubt and hesitated until the 
psychic moment had passed — one instance where 
not only Opportunity but his friends hung on him 
for weeks, but he did not rise. Writing to Ware 
he said: 

I suppose I ought to be grateful to the cabal 
of Democrats, Greenbackers, political cl — p-doc- 
tors, and bunco-steerers, for being the first to 
formally nominate me for a fourth term in the 
Senate ! That they did not represent the senti- 
ments of the Republican farmers of Kansas in 
their fulminations against me I have already 
many gratifying assurances. Of course nobody 
can predict, I mean foretell, what will happen 
politically, but I shall be greatly surprised if the 
people of Kansas stultify themselves by deliber- 

195 



POLITICS 

ately adopting such prescriptions as these quacks 
and Sarsaparilla physicians have written. With 
many demands of the Alliance I sympathize — 
Silver, more currency, cheaper transportation, 
tariff revision, and the suppression of the trusts, 
monopolies, grain gambling, &c, but I pause at 
the frontier. 

When hope of election was well-nigh gone he 
delivered that address in the Senate and labeled 
it "The Image and Superscription of Caesar". 
It excited derision only, when, if it had been pro- 
claimed in time, it might have turned the tide. 

But in this crisis of his affairs Ingalls bore 
himself well. He did not fail to see the ridicu- 
lous, as he always did, writing to Ware concern- 
ing a "terrifying letter from an agitated person" 
at Fort Scott: "I should say on general princi- 
ples that any man who asserted that there was 
not a 'vertious' woman in the land deserved to 
be knocked down in Topeka or anywhere else. 
The battery could be justified by an appeal to 
Lindley Murray". 

Over-zealous friends urged him to the use of 
money, but the day when York dramatically 
placed $7,000 on the Speaker's desk stood out 

196 



POLITICS 

clearly in his mind and memory, and he forbade 
absolutely what he was not inclined to do in any 
event. 

Ingalls met the situation with courage and dig- 
nity. The night before the election he addressed 
a splendid audience at the Grand Opera House in 
Topeka. He had a keen appreciation of dramatic 
effect. Before it was expected that he would be- 
gin his speech the auditorium was flooded with 
light, and he appeared on the stage, hat in hand, 
in faultless attire, and said, 

Whether in the battle to-morrow I shall survive 
or not, let it be said of me, that to the oppressed 
of every clime ; to the Irishman suffering from the 
brutal acts of Great Britain, or to the slave in the 
bayou of the South, I have at all times and places 
been their advocate ; and to the soldier, his widow 
and orphans, I have been their protector and 
friend. 

But he was beaten. 

An old-time friend living in Wyandotte County 
telegraphed Mrs. Ingalls : 
Madam : 

The leaf in the book upon which is written 
Ad astra per aspera has been temporarily turned 
down. 

197 



POLITICS 

Your husband does not need sympathy — it is 
the people of Kansas. 
The light has gone out. 

History has not yet dealt with those times. 
Indeed, it is scarcely necessary that it should. 
Ware embalmed them in the verse of his 
genius. Through his "The Kansas Bandit, or the 
Fall of Ingalls", the people a thousand years from 
now will be familiar with those disjointed days. 
This brief study is closed with extracts from that 
splendid poem. It discloses and preserves the 
well-known fact that even in its incipiency the 
revolution was the prey of unprincipled men ; and 
these finally wrecked it. 

THE KANSAS BANDIT: 

OR, 
THE FALL OF INGALLS. 

[Alonzo, the Bandit, is seen walking up and 

down the road, near Yellow Paint Creek, 

Kansas.] 

Alonzo. Here I parade the banks of classic 
Paint, while 
Poverty doth like a setting hen upon me 
Fortunes brood. 

198 



POLITICS 

The times were once when from 
Gigantic war recovering, the currency was to 

the 
Wants of business equal. With scanty rites, 
Economy, the sickly child of poverty, was then 

in 
Graveyard buried. Apace the times have 

changed. 
Drawpoker for the last four years remunera- 
tion 
Hath not yielded. Me constitution doth the full 
Assimilation of me normal rum refuse. No 

longer 
Will the credulous "bootlegger" accept me 
Promises. While upon the street women of 
Doubtful reputation snub me. The avenues of 
Honest labor all seem closed. The preachers on 
The roof do jeer at me down on the pavement. 
The times, the times are like a mule-kicked 

lantern 
Shattered: and all because the people do not 

rule. 
Now on the banks of classic Paint I stand, 
With deathless nerve I clutch this trenchant 

brand, 
And now and here, importunate and rash 
I face the world — exclusively for cash. 

199 



POLITICS 

[A stranger appears. Alonzo draws a sigh 
and a scythe, and cries:} 

Halt. Stand. Ducats or blood. 

[The stranger strikes an attitude and replies:'] 

My sir — I am in occupation holy, 
I am a follower of the meek and lowly ; 
Do not detain me. Ducats are a fiction ; 
I give thee all I have — a benediction. 

Before I got in politics, dear Bandit, 

I had a pulpit, and right well I manned it. 

I used to tell the story of the cross, 
But now I just talk politics and hoss. 
I'm down on Ingalls now, for his position 
I do not think real sound on prohibition. 

And many things he says doth much displease 

us; 
McGrath says In-galls wants another Jesus. 
Then Ingalls talks of "iridescent dreams," — 
That government is force. 

Alonzo. Give me thy cash — I fight not Ingalls, 
But poverty. 

Stranger. I have not cash. 

Alonzo. Pass on. 

[Enter tall stranger, with spectacles.'] 

200 



POLITICS 

Alonzo. Bullion or blood, of which 
Art thou most scanty? 
I'm the Kansas Bandit, 
Stand and ante. 

Stranger. Art thou the Paint Creek Bandit ? 

Alonzo. I are. 

Stranger. Do you believe in the purification 

Of Kansas politics and in the decalogue? 
Alonzo. Distract me not with thy pale cast 

Of thought : what man art thou, 

And where thy cash? 

Stranger. I am the Buck of Duke-ing-ham ; 

I'm fighting Ingalls every day, 

I'm fighting Ingalls every way. 
Alonzo. Art thou a farmer? 
Stranger. No, I am an agriculturist. 
Alonzo. What is the difference? 

Stranger. The farmer works the soil, 
The agriculturist works the farmer. 
Down in thy bootleg now thy cornknife sheath, 
While I of deep damnation tell to thee 
A tale of misery that far beneath 
That of thine own hath happened unto me. 
Perhaps you know me by my late biography — 
I am the author of that late Geography. 
I wanted to collect the revenue. 
I went to Atchison, and then and there 

201 



POLITICS 

I stayed with Ingalls for a week or two. 
He put in Leland, and it made me swear. 
Then Ingalls said, in words that seemed so real, 
"Dear General, won't you proceed to sheol." 
Alonzo. Thy tale is short, and yet it doth un- 
man me. 
Thou has more poetry than picayunes, 
More spondees than spondulics — 
Pass on thy way — pass on — thou need'st not 
Ante, for in the game of life none 
But the dealers ante. 

[Exit stranger.] 

The People's Party, to 

Which me native instinct draws me because it 
Loves the rule of mediocrity, is now on top. I 
Love the rule of Ignorance. I love to see a 

granger 
"Who doesn't know a pine refrigerator from a 

legal 
Maxim, discourse on finance, whittling on a 

store box. 

[Enter stranger.] 
Alonzo. What, hoe ! Stand and deliver. 
Stranger. Who art thou? Speak! 
Alonzo. I am a Bandit. Disgorge. 
Stranger. I also am a kind of Bandit. I run 
An anti-Ingalls newspaper. I have no cash. 

202 



POLITICS 

I take up a collection as I go, to pay 

My operating expenses — including my 

Fixed charges. 
Alonzo. Thou dost prevaricate. Thou are not an 

Editor of the People's Party. Thou hast 

On a clean shirt. 
Stranger. But a dirty undershirt — an awful 

dirty one. 
Alonzo. 'Tis well — but then — I want no shirt. 

Wealth must I have — disgorge. 
Stranger. I have no wealth. 
Alonzo. What hast thou, then? 
Stranger. I have intellect — lately discovered — 

But still I've got it. 
Alonzo. All that thou needst is thy 

Cere-bellum in these post-bellum days. 

A howler of calamity, 
He needs no brains, for damit 'e, 
Can work on cheek and vanity, 
Big whiskers and inanity. 
[Exit Stranger.] 

Alonzo. Ha! I'll let him go. 

I love calamity. I love to howl it 
And to hear it howled. 

[Enter lawyer.] 

Alonzo. Pause! Gold or gore. 

203 

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POLITICS 

Lawyer. I defy thee. 
Alonzo. Defy me not. 

My motto: 

Coin or Carnage. 

Lawyer. I am a lawyer, and I stand undaunted. 
Art thy name Alonzo? 

Alonzo. It art, but thine the duty not to stand a 
Gasing, but aghast. Eliminate thy wealth. 

I cannot stand and dicker 

Now with thee, 
But with a snicker 

Draw my snickersnee. 

Lawyer. Thou art of no more force than a last 
Year's chattel mortgage. 

Alonzo, dost remember erst- 
While before a Bourbon county jury when Jim, 
With Ciceronian voice and gesture, thee of mule 
Abduction did accuse, and prove it by some 
Dozen witnesses, although thou sworest thou 

wert 
In Emporia? And reckest thou not how thou 

thy 
Grip didst lose, and how, with white lips, thou 
Saidst — "Save me from hard labor," until I 

told 
Thee that I had Jim foul? And dost thou not 
Remember how that jury had been carefully 

204 



POLITICS 

Selected from sympathetic granger statesmen 

who 
Only read the "Union Labor" papers, and how 
With brilliant panegyric I thy honest brow 
Applauded, and how I called thee a hard-fisted 
Yeoman — victim, I said, of prostrate labor and 
Contraction, seeking for bread amid the ruins of 
Chaotic finance, — victim, I said, of insufficient 
Circulation, buffeted by rent and sleepless 

usury. 
How with quixotic rhetoric I did fight the gilded 
Vampires in the ambient ether, and how that 
Granger jury was so polly-foxed that they did 
Find a verdict of "not guilty"? 

Alonzo. Tis true — pass on — but stay. Hast 
Thou the due-bill that I gave thee for thy 
Effort ? 

Lawyer. I have-est. Behold it ! 

Alonzo. I know thou hast no money. 
Still I can't 

Do business here for nothing. 
I now 

Take hold and freeze onto this due-bill. 
(Takes bill.) Git! 

[Exit lawyer.} 

He's gone. — Behold, the sun is slowly setting. 
Why did I take this note? It's only "fiat." 

It isn't worth the trouble of the getting. 
I can't hypothecate the thing for diet. 
205 



POLITICS 

But it is good. The penmanship's proficient — 
It must be good — the paper's white and tough. 

"Due on demand" — that ought to be 
sufficient, 
And certainly the sum is large enough ; 

And why the thing won't buy a loaf of bread 
Is a conundrum that just knocks me dead. 

It seems to me that borrower and lender 
Have neither rights the other should respect — 

That each man's note should be a legal tender, 
Abolishing all methods to collect. 

Yet, 'mid all this calamity, there's Ingalls — 
"What hath he done for Kansas ? He doth flaunt 
His brains around, and with the nation 
mingles, — 
But it is cash, not brains, the people want. 
Down, down with Ingalls! brains don't 
represent 
The people now in Kansas worth a cent. 

[Tears up the note and throws it away.~\ 

The sun has set. The road no victim offers. 
I'm catching cold. Business is awful dull. 

[A barefooted person, with spectacles, is seen 
coming.'] 

Alonzo. Halt! Who comes there? Art thou a 
Moundbuilder, or a Troubadour? 

206 



POLITICS 

Stranger. I am a friend with the countersign. 

Alonzo. Advance, friend, and give the 
Countersign. 

Stranger. Down with Ingalls. 

Alonzo. The sentiment thou hast, but not the 
Words. The words are : Soc et tuum. 
As Elder says, — "them words is Latten." 

Stranger. Sock me no socks. Did not I upon 
The field of battle meet Prince Hal. ? 
Where now is Hal.? In those pathetic 
Words of poetess : ' ' The bark that held the 
Prince peeled off." When the 7th Dist. 
Did my sockless fibula behold, they yelled 
For me, and it was good-bye Hal. I know 
These people. Brains they do not want, 
For if they did, I'd give it to them. 
Hal. did not know what beat him — 'Twas 
Lack of moisture in the atmosphere. He 
Was the victim of climatic scarcity. My 
District expects me to produce territorial 
Humidity, and divide the rain-belt with 
the sea-board States. Ingalls could not 
Accomplish it. He therefore failed to be a 
Statesman. What has he done for Kansas? 
All she needs is rain. She having rain 
Has grain, and having grain had Ingalls. 
He could not make it rain, hence naught 
For Kansas had he done. Of course he 

207 



POLITICS 

Made some reputation for himself and 
State, and all the Union rang with Kansas 
And with Ingalls. And in the Senate, 
Leaning up against his own backbone, he 
Sat and ruled most royally, as to the 
Intellectual purple born. But still he 
Couldn't make it rain, and now we've got 
Him down! 

As to the earth the royal rain falls, 
We'll jeer at Ingalls.. — Accent on the "galls". 
[He passes on.] 
[Alonzo, frightened.] 
Ha! What is that coming up the road? 
It has a most peculiar aspect. 
I'll speak to it. What art thou? 
An adverb? 

Thing. No. A high moral plane. 

Alonzo. Thou art a strange thing. Thy object? 

H. M. P. The object of a high moral plane is to 
Get a reputation for being better than any 
Other thing. Not to be better, but to get the 
Reputation. Climb on; our object is to purify 
Politics by running it ourselves. To banish 
"Iridescent dreams." To take up prohibition, 
Female suffrage and the so-called ' ' moral ' ' isms 
That we can handle. We stuck a man in 
Wichita for selling beer one afternoon 
Seventy years in jail, with 27,000 dollars fine. 

208 



POLITICS 

We're down on Ingalls for another reason — 
He's an agnostic and blasphemer. His 
Speeches show he don't believe that there's 
Another happy world where he can go and 
Live forever with us moralists. Then 
He is vain, and vanity is what high moral 
Planes abhor. He lacks that 
Element of Christian humility that should 
Say unto the nearest Presiding Elder — thy 
Will in politics, not mine, be done. We 
Think morality requires a change, and that 
His vanity should be let down. We think 
That on the tombstone of his politics the 
Epitaph should be: 

Up was he stuck, 
And in the very upness 
Of his stucktitude 
He pell. 
{H. M. P. passes on.} 

Alonzo. I don't believe I want to climb 
Up on that thing. It holds a tough-lookin£ 
But congenial crowd. Prohibition was 
Once the thing to win with, but it ain't so 
Any more. Calamity is what now goes. 
Prohibition is now the last hope which 
Weak minds have for getting into office. 
But where's my cash upon this lonesome 

209 



POLITICS 

Road? There's no free silver. — Ho! 
Who conies here, in the twilight gloom? 

Stranger. A "noble granger," who with lung 
Voluminous would fain be heard. My 
Name is Calamity Bill. I have a way of 
Beating mortgages. 

Alonzo. Art thou armed? 

Stranger. Yes — with campaign documents. 

Alonzo. If thou hast any gold or silver, extract 
It from thy clothing. I am a hard-money 
Bandit. My demands are now payable in coin. 

Stranger. I have none. 

Alonzo. Greenbacks or national-bank notes ? 

Stranger. None. 

Alonzo. Bonds, coupons, or silver certificates? 

Stranger. None. 

Alonzo. Notes, mortgages, securities? 

Stranger. None. 

Alonzo. Checks, drafts, bills of lading, or 

Negotiable paper? 
Stranger. None. 

Alonzo. Hast anything within thy pockets? 
Stranger. Only tobacco. 
Alonzo. Fine-cut or plug? 
Stranger. Plug. 

210 



POLITICS 

Alonzo. I chew not plug. 
Hast thou good clothes? 
It's dark — I cannot see. 

Stranger. I have at home, not here. 
Intending to address the sturdy 
Yeomanry and whoop them up from an 
Industrial standpoint, I this night did don 
A suit of jeans for the occasion, such 
As I husk corn in. 

Alonzo. Art thy boots good? 

Stranger. Out at the toes and minus soles. 
I borrowed them. 

Alonzo. Thy hat? 

Stranger. I punched a hole a few yards back, 
And through the crown a matted lock 
I pulled. It's gayly waving through 
The orifice, although thou seest it not. 
I had to-night intended to explain 
Unto the bone and sinew of our country 
How Sherman and McKinley of a wealthy 
People made a nation full of paupers. 
How the Government should issue 
Money at one per cent, on farms, and 
Should build vast warehouses, wherein 
The products of the country can be stored 
And chattel-mortgaged to the Government. 
And how the way to make a dollar is 

211 



POLITICS 

To stamp a piece of paper and then 
Call it one. Language, not cash, 
Is all I have just now. 

Alonzo. Condemn the luck ! There is 
No scope for honest labor. Every avenue 
Is walled. See 

The depression that me present business 
Now endures. Oh, desperation! Say! 
See here. I must make business lively. 
I cannot wait the slow and tedious 
Restoration of those days when no man 
Worked yet everything was had. 
Prepare for death! I think that I can turn 
An honest penny by finding thee when 
A reward is offered. If all were idle, 
Business won't revive. Something 
Accomplished, something done, must earn 
A night's repose. I have within my heart 
Hot cells — 

Stranger. Shut up ! Hear me, thou victim 
Of commercial chaos. — Down at 
A school-house there expectant waits 
A Union Labor and Alliance caucus. 
The F. M. B.'s are coming in, and we 
Will talk of Ingalls and of money, 
Ocala, and the platform of St. Louis. 
I go to tell how laws must needs be 
Most unjust that will not let a 

212 



POLITICS 

Person beat a creditor. I have 
A money scheme, most noble Bandit, 
That beats two of yours. I can rob more 
Men in fifteen minutes than you can in years. 
With dangers yours is fraught, with mine 
Is none. Shall I reveal? 

Alonzo. Go on. 

Stranger. Thy style is antiquated. Men with 
Views like yours both schemes have tried, 
And the reflecting light of his 'try hath 
Taught that one can rob more people ten 
To one by the new process than the old. 
First. — Ingalls must be beaten. In his stead 
A man of the Alliance must be placed, here 
And elsewhere — a man of hair. We must 
Have Peffer or a mattress. Then we will 
Take the printing-presses, and make money, 
Loan to farmers at a nominal per cent, on 
Land by farmers valued. Make the money 
Legal tender, then we'll scoop 'em in. 
When once we get the timid, invalid and 
Weak to lose their faith in a metallic 
Currency, we've got 'em. They are left. 
We cannot reach the man who pins 
His faith to coin, except to blackguard him, 
And then he only laughs. But the great 
Masses with our doctrine stuffed, under 
Delusion give us property for paper. Of 

213 



POLITICS 

Honesty it hath a certain glamour. We 
Hold the truck the paper represents. 
They hold the paper, waiting its redeemer, 
Like Job of old did his, till time hath 
Worn them out and made them toss the 
Sponge. Thy name would give addition 
To our ranks. Come, go with me and 
Make thine opening exhortation. Be no 
Longer a Dime Novel Bandit, clad in plume 
And bootlegs. — But — shout "Calamity." 

[Tableaux. — Alonzo seen struggling with his 
conscience; at last he yields, and speaks.] 

This recent scheme, I hardly understand it ; 
There 's much more to it than I first surmised. 

It must commend itself to any bandit, 
Although, perhaps, it's somewhat civilized. 

But it's deficient in one thing I prize — 
To wit : a healthy outdoor exercise. 

Here in the raging Paint my blade I throw, 
And to the anti-Ingalls caucus go. 

Let's howl sub-treasury — free cash — and 
Peff er ; 
Let's go back on our mortgages — of course — 
While through our statesman's whiskers the 
wild zephyr, 
The Kansas zephyr, skips with solemn force. 

214 



POLITICS 

We'll down 'em, and we'll keep 'em down, 
that's plain; 
We'll keep 'em down as long as it don't rain. 

With flashing speed the pulse of evening 
tingles, 
Lo ! in the East comes the "free-silver" moon; 
Come on, come on — we'll whoop it up to 
Ingalls. 
We are all statesmen — let us all reune ; 

To this Alliance caucus let us go. 
Ha! Ingalls, ha! thou meet'st thy overthrow. 



215 



MISCELLANY 



MISCELLANY 

John James Ingalls. The first-born of Elias 
Theodore Ingalls and his wife Eliza Chase. 

Of Puritan ancestry. 

Born at Middletown, Massachusetts, December 
29, 1833. 

Was United States Senator from Kansas eigh- 
teen years — from 1873 to 1891. 

Died of bronchitis, at Las Vegas, New Mexico, 
August 16, 1900. Is buried at Atchison. 

Statue placed in Hall of Fame, Washington, by 
act of the Kansas Legislature. 



Ingalls was fond of walking. He loved to wan- 
der solitary and alone. About Atchison he 
strolled over prairies, along bluffs, through fields, 
under the trees of forest and orchard. 

When he was made Chairman of the Senate 
Committee on the District of Columbia, he walked 
about Washington constantly, and made himself 
familiar with its every feature and want. 



Ingalls wrote the Kansas Magazine articles 
219 



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MISCELLANY 

in his home on a small table in the living-room. 
The children were all about him, but seemed not 
to annoy him or distract his attention. He wrote 
slowly — that is, composed slowly. Mrs. Ingalls 
says he "wrote and tore up" his articles until 
they conformed to the requirements of his exact 
and discriminating taste. 



One competent to speak said of Ingalls: 

He knew language as the devout Moslem knows 
his Koran. All the deeps and shallows of the 
sea of words were sounded and surveyed by him 
and duly marked upon the chart of his great 
mentality. In the presence of an audience he 
was a magician; under the power of his magic, 
syllables became scorpions — an inflection became 
an indictment. And with words he builded 
temples of thought that excited at first the won- 
der and at all times the admiration of the world 
of literature and statesmanship. He was emperor 
in the realm of expression. 



That Ingalls was an acute observer of men 
and events is shown by his analysis of the char- 
acter of the Kansas man : 

It has been sometimes obscurely intimated that 
the typical Kansan lacks in reserve, and occasion- 

220 



MISCELLANY 

ally exhibits a tendency to exaggeration in dwell- 
ing upon the development of the state and the 
benefits and burdens of its citizenship. Censor- 
ious scoffers, actuated by envy, jealousy, malig- 
nity, and other evil passions, have intimated that 
he unduly vaunteth himself; that he brags and 
becomes vainglorious; that he is given to bounce, 
tall talk, and magniloquence. 

There have not been wanting those who affirm 
that he magnifies his calamities as well as his 
blessings, and desires nothing so much as to have 
the name of Kansas in any capacity in the ears 
and mouths of men. 

Such accusations are well calculated to make 
the judicious grieve. They result from a mis- 
conception of the man and his environment. 

The normal condition of the genuine Kansan is 
that of shy and sensitive diffidence. He suffers 
from excess of modesty. He blushes too easily. 
There is nothing he dislikes so much as to hear 
himself talk. He hides his light under a bushel. 
He keeps as near the tail-end of the procession as 
possible. He never advertises. He bloweth not 
his own horn, and is indifferent to the band- 
wagon. 

Ingalls was epigramattic. He said of Garland, 
Attorney-General of the United States under 
Cleveland: "General Garland is a great lawyer 

221 



MISCELLANY 

among Arkansaw men and a great Arkansaw 
man among lawyers." 

Describing his impressions of the Missouri 
River on his journey to settle in Kansas he said 
the steamboat was days and days ascending to 
Sumner, and that he was always in sight of tall 
cottonwoods and broad sandbars on one side of 
the river, or broad sandbars and tall cottonwoods 
on the other side of the river. 

He could descend from the stars and manifest 
interest in the most trivial household affairs. He 
had a clever turn, and in the first years of his 
home-life often mended gates and the sidewalk. 
With hammer and saw he constructed about the 
house convenient shelves and corners. And he 
was no indifferent workman. 

At home he always blacked his own boots. 



He would contemplate the valley of the Mis- 
souri for hours at a time. He seemed never to 
tire of the view. He studied the moods of the 
river, and days of bluster when sand-clouds 
drifted over it, it had a fascination for him. His 
first home was on a bluff in South Atchison com- 
manding an extensive view of river, bottoms and 

222 



MISCELLANY 

bluffs. Standing by this old house in after life, 
he wrote this idyl: 

Was it on this planet we lived alone, and loved 
in youth's enchanted kingdom amid the forests 
and by the great lonely river, looking with min- 
gled gaze at the eastern bluffs purpled by the 
autumnal sunset, or at the face of the moon 
climbing with sad steps the midnight sky ; or was 
it on some remote star in some other life, recalled 
with rapture and longing unutterable and un- 
availing? 

"Oh, death in life; the days that are no more!" 

The crumbling excavation scarce discernible 
among the vines and weeds and brambles, de- 
serted and inaccessible, ancient as Palmyra or 
Persepolis in seeming — was this the theatre 
whereon was enacted the intoxicating drama, the 
sweet tragedy of human passion, grief, joy, and 
endless separation? Since then, what devious 
wanderings of the soul, what darkened vistas, 
what trepidation, what struggle and solace, what 
achievements and defeat — what splendor and 
what gloom! The river flows, and the landscape 
is unchanged. Nature mocks with her perma- 
nence the mutability of man ; and the steadfast 
presence recalling life's vanished glory and bloom 
and dew of morning — how worthless and empty 
appear all that time gives, compared with what 

223 



MISCELLANY 

it takes away ! How gladly would we exchange 
the prizes of ambition and fame and wealth for 
the splendid consecration of youth and — 

"Wild with all regret — the days that are no more". 



Ingalls loved red as a color in his apparel. 
His flaming red ties became famous in Kansas; 
they were frequently a brilliant scarlet. In the 
days of his first residence in Atchison it was fash- 
ionable for men to wear in winter very heavy 
shawls. Ingalls exhibited his individuality and 
gratified his taste by wearing a red and gleaming 
blanket. 

He liked to be droll, even eccentric and gro- 
tesque, on occasion. In the last days of his resi- 
dence at Sumner he arrayed himself in a long 
linen duster, reaching to his heels. He stretched 
his enormous straw hat upward into a long peak. 
He was very tall and extremely slender, anyway, 
and thus clad he seemed of extraordinary height. 



It was, sometimes, with difficulty that Ingalls 
could be prevailed on to deliver his addresses 
and orations. Once he was to address some gath- 
ering in the East. He made excuses for remain- 

224 



MISCELLANY 

ing at home, but Mrs. Ingalls insisted that he 
should go. On the day he should have appeared 
before his audience she heard from him at St. 
Louis, where he said he was ill. In a few days 
he returned home, having cancelled his engage- 
ments. Mrs. Ingalls could not discover that he 
was ill, and was certain that his course resulted 
from reluctance to then go on with his work. 

This may have been in some degree due to his 
horror of speaking in public. On one occasion his 
fright was so great that he could not proceed with 
an address, and he had to stop and admit his 
failure. I have Ware's account of it. As the 
hour for the meeting approached Ingalls became 
more and more perturbed. He requested that 
Ware speak first. Ware agreed to speak five 
minutes. Ingalls urged him to make it fifteen 
minutes — then an hour. Ware spoke thirty min- 
utes. When Ingalls rose cold perspiration beaded 
his forehead. He stammered and halted and 
blundered for fifteen minutes, then quit. Years 
after, in a letter to Ware, he recalled the incident : 

I am glad to know that I have established any 
claim to the good will of the people of Fort Scott. 
I have not hitherto been able to disguise from 

225 



MISCELLANY 

myself the fact that I had few friends in that 
locality. I tried to make a speech there once, 
but the reception I met with "froze the genial 
currents of my soul!" It gives me the rigors to 
recall that polar evening. A declamation from 
the apex of an iceberg in the silence of an arctic 
midnight, would have been hilarious midsummer 
bacchanalian revelry by comparison. 

His frigid reception was altogether an illusion. 
Ware stopped talking for the reason that the 
audience was impatient and eager to hear Ingalls. 
Another illusion was manifest, for Ingalls had 
many friends in Fort Scott, — warm and faithful 
friends whose devotion has outlived the tomb. 
But remarkable delusions come to men of genius. 



The feud between Ingalls and Cleveland was 
not of the President's seeking. He had, in fact, 
counted on a sort of alliance with Ingalls. Of this 
intention the Senator had no intimation, and he 
was vitriolic in his references to the new incum- 
bent of the White House and his administration. 

Justice Field was a Democrat. Ingalls was a 
member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. By 
that maze of formal social precedents known as 
official etiquette in Washington, Mrs. Ingalls sat 

226 



MISCELLANY 

beside Justice Field at White House dinners for 
years. Her daughter Marion was so disgusted 
with the failure of the Republican party to nomi- 
nate Arthur for President that she avowed herself 
a Democrat, which avowal she steadily held to. 
At a dinner given soon after the inauguration of 
Cleveland, Mrs. Ingalls mentioned this fact to 
Justice Field. So remarkable did he consider it 
that he, later in the evening, informed the Presi- 
dent, who went at once to Mrs. Ingalls and re- 
quested her to bring her Democratic daughter to 
see him at the White House. 

Within a fortnight Mrs. Ingalls, in her daily 
drive about the city, passed the White House. 
Marion — then but a child — was with her, and 
it occurred to Mrs. Ingalls to stop and see the 
President. 

Cleveland was beset with many difficulties in 
getting his administration under way. He had 
little knowledge of the details of executive usage. 
The hungry and thirsty spoilsmen besieged him. 
He did not know whom to trust, and he reviewed 
all applications for office himself. This required 
much time, to secure which he excluded all callers 
during some hours other Presidents had been ac- 

227 



MISCELLANY 

cessible to the public. When Mrs. Ingalls ap- 
peared in the reception-room she was told that 
she could not see the President at that hour. She, 
however, added "and Marion" to the inscription 
on her card and had it carried to the President 
who directed that she be admitted at once. Mr. 
Cleveland met her cordially and expressed pleas- 
ure at seeing someone who did not come seeking 
an office. He was delighted to see Marion, en- 
gaged her in conversation, gave her flowers, and 
inquired who had given her her beautiful name. 
To this question she replied by naming the Ingalls 
family physician at Atchison. "Why", said the 
President, "he is one of the fellows wanting to 
be postmaster there." Mrs. Ingalls was surprised 
at what he said, thinking it wonderful that in 
such short time he had so familiarized himself 
with affairs as to be able to recognize an applicant 
for postmaster in a country village upon the mere 
mention of his name by a child. This introduced 
the subject of patronage, and Mr. Cleveland men- 
tioned the embarrasment under which he was 
laboring. He wished to appoint only the best 
men, but he knew that political endorsements did 
not usually fall to the best men. He spoke kindly 

228 



MISCELLANY 

of Senator Ingalls, and Mrs. Ingalls knew when 
she left that he would not be averse to having the 
judgment of her husband on the applications for 
office from Kansas. When she went home she 
learned that he had that day spoken with such 
bitterness of the new President and his adminis- 
tration that no such relation as had been sug- 
gested by Mr. Cleveland could ever be possible. 

Ill-feeling between these two great men in- 
creased from that day and grew into one of the 
most famous and most bitter official feuds in the 
history of our government. 



Mrs. Ingalls was in the galleries and heard the 
famous passage at arms between her husband and 
Senator Voorhees. She saw the tall Hoosier led 
vanquished from the Senate chamber. Later she 
and a party of friends went into the Senate res- 
taurant and ordered refreshments, and sent for 
Ingalls but were told that the Senate had ad- 
journed and that the Senator had gone immed- 
iately home. 



The extreme bitterness between Ingalls and 
Chief-Justice Horton as a result of the contest of 

229 



MISCELLANY 

the second election was a feature in Kansas poli- 
tics for years. But these two great Kansans 
were brought to a reconciliation through the 
efforts of Bailie P. Waggener, the friend of both. 
The meeting was in the office of Waggener in 
Atchison. It had been previously arranged, and 
was set for a late hour in the evening. Horton 
arrived promptly, but Ingalls was late by a quar- 
ter of an hour, as was his habit. He came in with 
an apology for his tardiness. He was faultlessly 
attired and perfectly composed. When he en- 
tered the room Waggener said that he supposed 
they would prefer to be alone and offered to 
withdraw, but was urged to remain by both, 
which he did. 

Ingalls began the advances necessary to the 
matter by saying that he regretted the famous 
Atchison speech more than he could tell. Horton 
came forward with words of apology for his 
course. Amends were made and perfect harmony 
secured before midnight. Of this event very few 
people were ever informed. Horton and Ingalls 
had been associated a long time in the publication 
of the "Atchison Champion" in the absence of 
John A. Martin, the proprietor, in the army. 

230 



MISCELLANY 

Bailie P. "Waggener is one of the foremost 
lawyers of the West. He is General Solicitor for 
the Missouri Pacific Railway, in the service of 
which he has been for many years. He is a Demo- 
crat, and has long been prominent in Kansas 
public affairs. As State Senator from Atchison 
County he secured the passage of a bill giving 
one of the places at the disposition of Kansas in 
Statuary Hall at Washington to Ingalls; also an 
appropriation to pay for the statue of the famous 
Kansan. This statue has been placed in the Hall, 
and it is by far the finest and most striking to be 
seen there. 



Of mountains, Ingalls said : 

What an immortal fascination there is about 
mountains! Their solemnity, their silence, the 
grandeur of their outlines, the unspeakable glory 
of their lofty crags and "snowy summits old in 
story", and their splendid inutility! 

When you look upon the vague and troubled 
immensity of the ocean, you think of commerce 
and codfish and whales. When you contemplate 
the grassy waste of prairies, expanding to the 
skies, you think of wheat and corn and pigs and 
steers. But Pike's Peak and Sierra Blanca and 
Trenchery and Culebra and the Tetons are good 

231 



MISCELLANY 

for nothing except adoration and worship. Man 
does not profane their solitudes where the un- 
heard voices of the winds in the forests, of waters 
falling in the abyss, and the eagle's cry have no 
audience nor anniversary. 



And of the sea Ingalls wrote : 

The ancients had a saying that those who 
cross the sea change their sky, but not their 
minds, — "Qui trans mare current coelum non 
animam mutant". No man can escape from 
himself. The companionship is inseparable. 

But there is something more than change of 
locality in the isolation of a long ocean voyage. 
When the last dim headland disappears, and the 
continent vanishes in the deep, the separation 
from the human race is complete. All the accus- 
tomed incidents and habits of life are suspended, 
and those who are assembled in that casual 
society might be the solitary survivors of man- 
kind. 

Wars and catastrophes and bereavements may 
shock the world, but here they are unheard and 
unknown. Suns rise and set and rise again, but 
the great ship makes no apparent progress. She 
remains the centre of an unchanging circum- 
ference. The vast and sombre monotony is un- 
broken. Above is the infinite abyss of the sky 

232 



MISCELLANY 

with its clouds and stars. Beneath is the infinite 
abyss of the sea with its winds and waves. Some- 
times the faint phantom of a sail appears above 
the vague fluctuating horizon and silently fades 
away, or a stain of smoke against the distant 
mist discloses the pathway of some remote and 
unknown tenant of the solitude. 

The moods of the sea are endless, but it has 
no compassion. It glitters in the sun, but its 
smile is cruel and relentless. It is eager to de- 
vour. Its forces are destructive. Each instant is 
fraught with peril. Its agitation is incessant, and 
it lies in wait to engulf and destroy. Resisting 
every effort to subdue its obstacles, when its baf- 
fled billows are cleft, they gather in the ghastly 
wake, and rage at their discomfiture. 

In the presence of this implacable enemy, whose 
smiles betray, whose voice is an imprecation, 
whose embrace is death, meditation becomes 
habitual and the mind changes like the sky. 



In the famous interview on politics, Ingalls 
said: 

The purification of politics is an iridescent 
dream. Government is force. Politics is a battle 
for supremacy. Parties are the armies. The 
Decalogue and the Golden Rule have no place 
in a political campaign. The object is success. To 

233 



MISCELLANY 

defeat the antagonist and expel the party in 
power is the purpose. The Republicans and Dem- 
ocrats are as irreconcilably opposed to each other 
as were Grant and Lee in the Wilderness. They 
use ballots instead of guns, but the struggle is 
as unrelenting and desperate and the result 
sought for the same. In war it is lawful to de- 
ceive the adversary, to hire Hessians, to purchase 
mercenaries, to mutilate, to destroy. The com- 
mander who lost the battle through the activity 
of his moral nature would be the derision and 
jest of history. This modern cant about the 
corruption of politics is fatiguing in the extreme. 
It proceeds from tea-custard and syllabub dilet- 
tanteism and frivolous sentimentalism. 



BD 



LBAp'22 



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